Ever since the Lal Masjid operation, President Pervez Musharraf has had to face retaliatory action from militant factions all over Pakistan, who are backed and continuously urged by the Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Zawahiri ‘obsessed with killing Musharraf’

There's nothing like the right TV spot to heal the sectarian divide.

Virtually every action, message, and decision of a military force shapes the opinions of an indigenous population: strategic communication, treatment of civilians at vehicle checkpoints, and the accuracy or inaccuracy of aerial bombardment.

Themes of US goodwill mean little if its actions convey otherwise. Consequently, a unified message in both word and deed is fundamental to success.

Business marketing practices provide a useful framework for improving US military efforts to shape the attitudes and behaviors of local populations in a theater of operations as well as those of a broader, international audience.

Enlisting Madison Avenue extracts lessons from these business practices and adapts them to US military efforts, developing a unique approach to shaping that has the potential to improve military-civilian relations, the accuracy of media coverage of operations, communication of US and coalition objectives, and the reputation of US forces in theater and internationally.

Foremost among these lessons are the concepts of branding, customer satisfaction, and segmentation of the target audience, all of which serve to maximize the impact and improve the outcome of US shaping efforts.

Beware the AdWords on Google Arabic:

We were surprised at the success with Arabic. Keywords in Arabic were among the top performers with click-through rates often exceeding 30%.

Enlisting Madison Avenue: The Marketing Approach to Earning Popular Support in Theaters of Operation

"This isn't just about going in and blowing things up."

US military and civilian authorities must stop thinking of themselves as a "good-idea factory" whose every thought has greater merit than those of their customers.

It could be too late for extensive rebranding of the US effort in Iraq.

Much of what works for consumer advertising in the US might not translate well in Baghdad. But urban ops is all about experimenting and adapting to new realities.

The study is available.

The Pentagon Gets a Lesson From Madison Avenue

Here, in a study published in June 2006 by the military's Joint Special Operations University, two "information warfare" specialists mull over how the US armed forces and intelligence agencies might influence opinion overseas through foreign bloggers:

... [I]t may be easy for foreign audiences to dismiss the US perspective with "Yes, but you aren't one of us, you don't really understand us."

In this regard, information strategists can consider clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers or other persons of prominence already within the target nation, group or community to pass the US message. ... Sometimes numbers can be effective; hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering. On the other hand, such operations can have a blowback effect, as witnessed by the public reaction following revelations that the US military had paid journalists to publish stories in the Iraqi press under their own names. People do not like to be deceived, and the price of being exposed is lost credibility and trust.

An alternative strategy is to "make" a blog and blogger. The process of boosting the blog to a position of influence could take some time, however. ...

There will also be times when it is thought to be necessary, in the context of an integrated information campaign, to pass false or erroneous information through the media ... in support of military deception activities. ... In these cases, extra care must be taken to ensure plausible deniability and nonattribution, as well as employing a well-thought-out deception operation that minimizes the risks of exposure.

General Memetics, on Tom Ricks's Inbox

A recent post reminded me of this; it seems I've never recommended it.

If today were half as good as tomorrow is supposed to be, it would probably be twice as good as yesterday was.

Ninety percent of the time things will turn out worse than you expect. The other 10 percent of the time you had no right to expect so much.

One-tenth of the participants produce over one-third of the output. Increasing the number of participants merely reduces the average output.

Most projects start out slowly, and then sort of taper off.

A few more of the laws are listed here. See Google Books for a preview.

Augustine's Laws

"It's basically a way to make socially acceptable something we all kind of know is wrong."

It's about desire -- how much we are willing to deceive ourselves in the reckless pursuit of something forbidden.

The beauty of the five-second rule is that it is utterly pliable and that it is not about food so much as it is about yearning and disgust and gastronomic history and evolutionary wiring and the implicit social contract we make when we break (and drop) bread with other human beings.

See also another recent post about disgust.

How Soon, and How Often?

Highslide JS is a piece of JavaScript that streamlines the use of thumbnail images on web pages. The library offers these features and advantages:

* No plugins like Flash or Java required.
* Popup blockers are no problem. The images expand within the active browser window.
* Single click. After expanding the image, the user can scroll further down or leave the page without restoring the image.
* The approach uses two separate images. No heavy full-size image packed into thumbnail display size! The full-size image is loaded in the background either on page load or when the user clicks the thumb. You specify this option in the script's settings.
* Compatibility and safe fallback. If the user has disabled JavaScript or the JavaScript fails in any way, the browser redirects directly to the image itself. This fallback is able to cope with most exceptions and incompatibilities.

This is actually quite slick....

Highslide JS - JavaScript thumbnail viewer

It used to be really cool to cite Marshall McLuhan.

YouTube for President

On one level, Magnum became the personification of an American society that had yet to deal effectively with the fallout from the Vietnam War. By the end of the 1980s, the struggle to deal with the unresolved issues of the war erupted full force into American popular culture. Before Magnum began to deal with his psychological scars in the context of the 1980s, network programmers apparently believed that any discussion of the war in a series would prompt viewers to tune it out. With the exception of Norman Lear's All in the Family in the early 1970s, entertainment network programming acted, for the most part, as if the war had never occurred. However, Magnum, P.I.'s success proved programmers wrong. Certainly, the series' success opened the door for other dramatic series which were able to examine the Vietnam War in its historical setting. Series such as Tour of Duty and China Beach, though not as popular, did point out that room existed in mainstream broadcasting for discussions of the emotional and political wounds that had yet to heal. As Thomas Magnum began to deal with his past, so too did the American public.

Magnum, P.I.

David Bolinsky and his team at XVIVO illustrate scientific and medical concepts with high-drama animation.

These animators are true auteurs, carefully scripting and editing the story of cellular processes to show everyone -- expert and amateur alike -- the truth and the beauty of our bodies.

You've never seen the life of a cell quite like this.

High drama inside a cell