Good Cause, Inc.

A regular TV viewer should be forgiven for wondering how America's largest corporations manage to stay afloat. They seem to spend so much time, money, and lip-biting emotional effort saving the world that it's a wonder they manage to make a profit. Yet despite all the humanitarian airlifts, disease-stopping research, and pollution clean-ups, somehow they manage to scrape by. The litany of self-lauding corporate do-gooders is seemingly endless. Tanqueray gin has generously lent its name, logo, and budget to rallies against AIDS. Disney responds to the last wishes of dying children and adults, so long as those wishes can be fulfilled with--and this comes straight from the Disney web page--"the screening of a recent Disney film, baskets of character merchandise, special audiotaped messages from Disney characters, or a shopping spree at a local Disney Store." It's a nice sentiment, but there's something deeply macabre about slipping into the afterlife to the sound of Donald Duck's solemn condolences.

Miller Brewing, in what appears to be a fit of real guilt (or extreme chutzpah) sponsors shelters for battered women, some of whom were likely assaulted by overindulgent consumers of alcoholic beverages. And in July 2001, The Wall Street Journal reported that Kraft/Philip Morris brought forty-three tons of food to Kosovar refugees--and then publicized the donation with a P.R. budget that dwarfed that of the food donation itself.

But why do Americans, as consumers, seem to fall for it? The answers lie not only with the slick and highly evolved art of corporate media manipulation, but also in the hearts of the target audience. Corporate P.R. professionals know how to uncover and exploit what consumers feel. Ask a media historian about the birth of corporate P.R., and she or he will regale you with stories about pioneers like George Creel, whose official Committee on Public Information mobilized U.S. opinion in support of joining World War I, or Ivy Lee, the field's intellectual godfather. Trivia buffs, take note: Lee once worked simultaneously for Standard Oil and I.G. Farben, a German chemical cartel with strong Nazi ties, thereby setting an ethical benchmark for P.R. professionals that has been maintained through the ages.

But when P.R. pioneers weren't battling pesky activists like Mary Harris "Mother" Jones (whom Lee controversially denounced as a prostitute), they were developing techniques that sound eerily familiar to observers of contemporary corporate tactics.

The primary tactic is still to stamp your logo onto something good. In the age of the robber barons, this meant setting up vast charitable foundations. The charitable legacies of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie continue to roll with force, pushing the monopolistic and brutally anti-labor habits of America's grand industrialists further back into the shadows of history. But today, the foundations of robber barons and modern corporations are moving beyond charitable support for tony cultural events and educational endowments, and toward more gauzy displays. They have shown an eagerness to attach their public image to things like children, preferably presented in a carefully calibrated assortment of colors. Or experimental vaccines. Or tall, noble pine trees, creaking ever so slightly as they sway majestically in the breeze. Rather than endowing a foundation that funds a group that provides disaster relief, why not put the Miller logo on water bottles and ship 'em out directly to people in need?

It's a P.R. masterstroke to tie a major corporation to a human act as clear and dignified as sharing water with those in need. Corporations, for tax and liability purposes; have enjoyed the status of individuals since the resolution of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad, a suit decided by the Supreme Court in 1886. Now, Miller can be seen as an individual doing something soulfully nice.

Different companies take different approaches. If you're Philip Morris, you produce ads that show kids "it's not cool to smoke," thereby guaranteeing tobacco's youth cachet as an illicit commodity. In 2001, the company even distributed twenty-six million free book covers to school children, which warned the kids not to smoke--and put the Philip Morris logo into their little hands. If you're Microsoft, you--somewhat transparently--donate Windows-based computers to technologically deprived schoolchildren around the country. Thousands of kids, many of them disadvantaged, get access to computers and educational software. And Microsoft gets to imprint its operating system and software on young people nationwide while ensuring that its Windows standard takes a prominent place in communities across the nation.

And if you're Shell Oil, famed for your bloody ties to Nigeria, you change the subject entirely and run a bizarrely irrelevant ad campaign to stop young people from driving while eating food and talking to friends in an animated manner.

In a perfect world, these efforts would be inconsequential. In our fantasyland of informed consumers, citizens would say: "Sure, Giant OilCo spends 6 percent of its marketing budget researching environmentally friendly ways to dispose of toxic oil sludge. But it spends 25 percent of its marketing budget publicizing that effort, and 100 percent of its (considerably larger) operations budget creating the sludge in the first place."

But in our famously imperfect real world, all that people generally remember is this: "Oil companies pollute. But Giant OilCo also donates part of its profit to support an anti-cancer foundation." Two pieces of information with vastly different weight quickly take on parallel status once the underlying detail has been lost or obscured--assuming it was available to begin with.

This is a state of affairs perhaps best explained by the "Grocery List Principle": If you try to remember that you need eggs, parsley, and a new toothbrush, for the twenty minutes it takes to get to the grocery store and perambulate through the aisles, you'll probably have eggs, cilantro, and a box of Lucky Charms by the time you get home. That's why we write lists. That's why we write things on our hands. And that's why it only takes a little bit of glossy imagery to counterbalance or obscure a long, rich history of corporate misbehavior.

So as you watch a noble bald eagle soar majestically above stands of virgin pine trees--on television--remember whose funding is making it fly.

James Norton (www.jrnorton.com) is an international news editor at The Christian Science Monitor (www. csmonitor.com) and co-founder of Flak Magazine (www.flakmag.com).