IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015 - 6

In the idiom of Madison Avenue,
PAO was to provide "news feed on
behalf of the brand." They were
to create a coherent and consistent brand framework within which
brand stories could be created,
and within which the brand was
"positioned." They were aggregating more than reporting. They were
focused on sustaining the public's
interest in a time-sensitive manner, as well as their trust in the
program. The time-sensitive targets were front-page stories in an
era when daily newspapers were
still dominant, as well as top billing on television news in the days
when there were only three TV networks. The ultimate objective was
a human walking on the moon as
the most tele-visually watched realtime event, with an estimated six
hundred million viewers. Prior to
Armstrong's walk on the lunar surface, public information releases
on television had been on a timedelayed basis.
Historically for Scott and Jurek,
brand management came to be
conceived as brand journalism
cultivating the information landscape. It was for the co-authors
"the largest, and we believe, the
most important marketing and public relations case study in history."
Here the campaign involved nation
branding in which the PR campaign
was to make the public feel closer
to the nation's space project. If we
go back in the development of modern American advertising, Elmo
Calkins had stressed positioning
brands as concrete expressions of
valued ideals and aspirations.
By the 1950s, David Ogilv y
and Leo Burnett refined the guiding principles of selling the brand
image, now emphasizing a branded content campaign wherein
the target audience's desires are
molded into a sense of a volitional
choice and participation in what

ought to be in the good life, as
well into an acquiescence in and
support of the brand's authority.
The goal is to sustain an affective
"buy in," wherein the brand is
included in the self and its aspirations. Brand journalism establishes the framework within which
non-interrupted content marketing builds brand credibility; and
both sustains and grows the brand
attachment attitudes and behavior.
The content is the well-told
story. With the Apollo program it
was a packaged quest story as a
national mission, the wonder of a
sense of adventure and participation
in a quest President John F. Kennedy referred to as a "New Frontier."
The key elements of a quest are fulfilled in the telling of the story. The
hero here is the Nation. There is the
goal: sending a man to the moon
and bringing him back safely before
the end of the 1960s. There is the
recurrent reminder of the hardships
along the way: none before "ever so
difficult and expensive."
But the undercurrent to the
content story was the goal of convincing America and the World
of our national competence. The
imagery of spaceflight was to be
presented as a powerful and tangible weapon to be wielded in the
Cold War. Americans were reminded of the Russians launching an
artificial space satellite called
Sputnik in October 4, 1957; and
orbiting the first man in space, cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, on 12 April
1961. The deeper patriotic message was that Americans did not
want to see space dominated by
vehicles and astronauts of other
nations; did not want to see the
nation's falling behind the Soviet
Union in the new space race theatre
of the Cold War; did not want to see
the Soviet Union get to the moon
first. Quoting President Lyndon
B. Johnson:"Now would you rather

IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

have us be a second rate nation or
should we spend a little money?"
In an interview with iaquire.com
(March 27, 2014), Scott expresses regret that the Apollo marketing
"was not sustained. That's why we
haven't landed humans on Mars." It
is here where Scott reveals the limits of his celebratory narrative, and
demonstrates a mentalité taken aim
at in two other books on the Apollo
Program published in the past year
and a half. First, there is intellectual
historian Matthew Tubbe's No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American
Culture (Oxford University Press,
2014). Tubbe recalls President Richard Nixon sighing during the 1973
OPEC oil embargo that he couldn't
get America come together to meet
the new challenge "in the Spirit of
Apollo?" Tubbe calls attention to
the crumbling of the Robert McNamara aura of technocracy incarnate,
as conservative congressional contempt for government "expertise"
began to surge. Tubbe notes that
the American mood for space exploration started to flag and shift after
Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon.
Starting again in the later 1970s,
new generations of American had
their fascination with space, technology and now robotics rekindled by
George Lucas's epoch-shifting film
Star Wars. "May the force be with
you." In the next decade President
Ronald Reagan would turn again to
the quest story of American technological prowess and resolve in
winning the Cold War. This time
Reagan's Star Wars ballistic missile
Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI)
was used as a ploy to explicitly neutralize the Soviet Union's nuclear
arsenal, but implicitly to force Russia into a missile defense system
race that sped the Soviet Union's
eventual fall into financial collapse.
The other extraordinary recent complementary book on the Apollo
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september 2015

http://www.iaquire.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2015