Marketing

"The State Dept. is looking for a PR firm to promote a monthly Arabic language magazine that it plans to debut in the Spring," O'Dwyer's PR Daily reports. "The magazine will be targeted at Muslims aged 18-to-35 living in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia. The International Information Programs unit, which is the result of the Oct. 1999 merger of the U.S. Information Agency into the State Dept., is handling the magazine launch."

On October 9, Microsoft posted a testimonial on its Web site called "Confessions of a Mac to PC Convert." It was a first-person account by a "freelance writer" about how she had fallen in love with Windows XP. "I was up and running in less than one day, Girl Scout's honor," said the attractive, woman in the photo. "There was only one problem: She doesn't exist," writes David Pogue. "A with-it member of Slashdot.org, the popular hangout for articulate nerds, happened to notice that the woman's picture actually came from GettyImages.com, a stock-photo agency.

"Several decades into the era of consumer capitalism, the whiz kids on Madison Avenue have learned fairly well how to attach psychic puppet strings to our minds, but they have never really known why (or often whether) their tricks worked," writes Matthew Blakeslee. "Enter the age of neuroscience. As investigators plumb ever deeper into the strange dynamics of the brain, they are shedding new light on many domains of human behavior, including mental illness, violence, cooperation, addiction, eating and even aesthetics. ... The lines between manipulation, free choice and manufactured vs.

Madison Avenue-style advertising aimed at Middle Eastern audiences isn't likely to work for the U.S. government, says Harold C. Pachios, chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. "There's more to America than Calvin Klein jeans--and that's the point," said Harold C. Pachios, chairman of the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. "We are thought of as superficial, so we need to avoid anything that smacks of the superficial."