March 23, 2010 at 5:32 pm
filed under research, video
Tagged branding, Desirée Rogers, marketing, Obama
President Obama’s Social Secretary, Desirée Rogers, will be stepping down in April.
I had the pleasure of meeting Ms. Rogers when I was a student at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. I interviewed her for my experimental documentary- 2096: A Lottery Odyssey. The video was based on a story quoted form a Lottery Magazine, about the perils of a futuristic lottery addict.
In looking at the clips today, I find it funny that I had the nerve to bluntly ask Desirée Rogers if the lottery was a regressive tax on the poor. I am not sure I would be so direct today. See the clip below for some snippets (apologies for my experimental sound design, I was 21).
In rehashing her career with the Obama administration, The New York Times’ Peter Baker writes about White House staff’s displeasure in her referring to the “Obama brand” during interviews in glossy fashion magazines in the early days of her assignment.
I think Desirée Rogers was being honest, albeit opening the administration up to criticism from opponents.
Naomi Klein’s piece “No Logo Update,” in a recent issue of The Baffler descibes the top-level marketing behind the Obama campaign. She writes that for the first time corporate brands were upstaged by politics and piggybacked on Obama’s campaign (i.e. Pepsi).
Although David Axelrod scoffed at Desirée Rogers’ comments, her statements were common knowledge.
In the time since the election, the marketing wars have not stopped. The health care debate has seemed like a bad episode of Reality TV. It is depressing, but I find a voice of comfort in the last few paragraphs of Naomi Klein’s article:
Personally, none of this [branding, marketing] makes me feel betrayed by Barack Obama. Rather, I have a familiar ambivalence, the way I used to feel when brands like Nike and Apple started using revolutionary imagery in their transcendental branding campaigns…All of their high-priced market research had found a longing for something more than shopping—for social change, for public space, for greater equality and diversity. …Our ideas weren’t as passé as we had been told. And since the brands couldn’t fulfill the deep desires they were awakening, social movements had a new impetus to try.
Sources:
Obama Social Secretary Ran Into Sharp Elbows, Peter Baker, Nytimes.com, March 1, 2010
No Logo Update, Naomi Klein, The Baffler, Vol. 2 No. 1, 2010