The Power of Iconography

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I just saw this on Youtube. It's a very well done piece on the use of icons and imagery in recent politics, most especially by the Obama campaign. The speaker exhibits obvious political bias toward republicans, but he tends to keep it to a minimum. (He calls the conservative ideology "...on balance, the most nutritious philosophical meal ever devized..." and criticizes Obama's use of his emblem in place of the Seal of the President, buth that's about it for an 8 minute clip. At another point, when talking about iconography used for the "two great totalitarian ideologies of the early 20th century", he also adds "it would be absolutely obscene to compare the horror they generated... to what's going on here today. That was mass-murder, this is merely advertizing.")

Responses? Ideas? Can iconography spell the downfall for Obama just as it helped forge his rise to power? Can a republican candidate employ similar techniques to create a similar rise to power? Is this the new face of politics?

Obviously, the Obama campaign's iconography is only a part of his reason for being President of the United States today, but I think we can all agree that it's a sizable part. If Obama had employed the same kind of stiff iconography that other politicians have used over the past few years, his win would be more questionable.

 

No, I don't think so, but it's your opinion.

BTW, they took this notion from a book that was published a few years ago on symbolism in art - I just can't remember the name. But it had a chapter devoted to how the GWB admistration used art symbolism as well. This is nothing new...I'll try to find a link to the book, but it's been several years since I've looked at it.

The book I had looked at was _How Art Made The World_



As I said, none of this is anything new.

 

No, hardly anything new, but I do think Obama brought a new (or at least revitalized) dimension to it's application in politics. I'd rate Obama's icon right up there with the best examples in commercial marketing history. It definitely was heads and tails above anything I've seen in politics before.

 

If you watched the link I provided, I don't know how you can possibly state that with any level of seriousness, considering how much it was used by GWB and his minions.

 

Actually, I can't watch the video right now, so no, I haven't.

EDIT:
To allay confusion, the problem is on my side and should be remedied soon.

 

Well, no wonder. Sorry, NOG. But the link even goes into some of the details regarding GWB's stage at the convention in 2004, and how the original was replaced to contain some of the more powerful imagery of his presidency, and especially, 9/11.

 

These tricks might work to fire up the base but I doubt they'll be the deciding factor for the swing-voters who usually end up deciding the vote anyhow. So I think both videos are really overanalyzing these symbols way over the point any normal human being even bothers to notify them. It's really just a question of marketing tricks, when you see a very well done advert you might be thinking about how well it was done and the product might stick in your mind a little longer but rarely feel compelled to go out and buy the product (or if you do then you need some professional help). The same goes for politics really.

 

I agree with Morgoroth. Surely Obama is more the beneficiary of an overwhelming swing away from Bush and the Republicans than because he a decent avatar.

 

Chandos, finally got to watch the video. I think there's a huge difference between Bush's stage in 2004 and Obama's icon in 2008. The difference is distribution. I honestly never saw that stage before now, and I'll bet a lot of other voters never did, either. On the other hand, Obama's icon has been everywhere. The real difference is the simplicity.

Bush's imagery was complex and heavily dependent on context and motion. You can't take a picture of that, put it on a bumpersticker, and get the same effect, or even close. Basically, it was imagery, not an icon. It was a crowded stadium, not a logo, not an icon.

Obama's logo, his icon, was both common-place and majestic. It was a way to put Bush's entire stage on every bumpersticker, every billboard, every sign, every commercial, and every web-page. Bush's logo, on the other hand, while similarly common-place, was flat and dead. It was the equivalent of him standing in front of a white screen and smiling.

To Morgoroth ad Harbourboy, as I said, Obama certainly won because of more than just that, but I do believe that the use of his icon played a noticable roll in his winning the election. I believe that, had Obama used an icon similar to Bush's in 2004, at the very least he'd have won by several percentage points (and states) less.

 

I had to click on your link NOG and fast forward so I could find the Obama logo as it had in no way stuck in my mind. I could not recollect it. I do not know what that means but I think it means something.

 

People's personal experience is going to be different. I was only comparing the content of the two pieces. And to be honest, I don't know why you bothered to post the link without a disclaimer. If you thought that the piece about the stage was unimportant, which your link included in the content, then you should have stated that you didn't agree some of your own link.

So your only point in all this is that Obama had a better bumper sticker than McCain? Big deal.

BTW, Bush/Cheney had the WIN sticker, which had an obvious double meaning, regarding both the election and "winning" the war on terror. I thought it was very clever, since Bush was really only a one issue candidate, but he played that one issue very effectively.

Me neither. I never watch the Republican conventions.

 

Well, both the title and focus of the youtube video was "Iconography", i.e. the use of an Icon. While Bush's stage use versus that of the DNC is definitely on par, I don't think icon usage gets even close.

Yes, Obama had a better bumper sticker. Much better. Obama's was on par with a Coca-Cola ad campaign. McCain's was on par with Debby's Daycare down the street. So have most campaigns in the past. Obama, on the other hand, does a little better. And yes, I do think it makes a huge difference. Advertizing is what campaigns are all about these days (for good or ill).

I'm not sure what you're talking about. I tried googling it, but I couldn't find any "win" stickers. If you mean the W'04 sticker, I thought it was pathetic myself. If you mean something else, could you link a pic?

 

This my take from corporate America: For a short time I worked for a company that had one of the top 10 logos in the WORLD, and I sat in on the company class with a media person in which the discussion was about the "corporate image." While logos themsevles are important, what the media person commented on is that it's what the logo "represents" to the consumer that gives it its real appeal. He spent sometime talking about a few of the particular logos that have excited you in this thread - McDonald's was one he spent sometime on, because iirc, he said that it was the #1 corporate logo in the world. His point was that the logo was quite meaningless without something meaningful behind it. Also, if a company was a bad one, the logo could amplify even further a tarnished corporate image.

Here's more for you to consider:

There's more to an advertizing campaign than just a bumper sticker. I think you are over-rating a small aspect of something much larger. They actually do real research on this, and you can probably find some research data on why Obama won the election, rather than a silly link put together by a poltical hack-job from PJ media.

 

Oh, that's definitely true. The logo is a distribution mechanism for the image it represents. That's why Obama's logo, ultimately, could never be the entire reason for his win, no matter how good it was. Obama's logo, though naturally visually appealing, won't make anyone vote for anything. It will bring a great many things to mind every time it's seen, though, provided it's linked to those things.

Actually, this gets rather interesting because one of the primary differences, IMO, was the distribution of Obama's logo compared to others. So, it's the distribution of the distribution that matters? Well, yes. That and the fact that it's just a visually appealing image. It's an image that you naturally like to look at (psychology on that one), which means it'll draw the eye where others won't.

Actually, this site seems to indicate that the research, while being done, is still in a rather primitive state. As with all psychology, the study of the voting mind is a very young science, and the complexity of the problems are very high.

All in all, though, I think the issue comes down to four major categories:
1.) Major events (gaffes, rising to a challenge, etc.)
2.) Political platforms
3.) Distribution of one's own positive image (i.e. distributing the positive factors of 1 & 2)
4.) Distribution of one's opponent's negative image (i.e. distributing the negative factors of 1 & 2 for your opponent)

For Obama, the logo was the core of #3. They put it on everything, whereas most other people use it on their official website, bumperstickers, and yard signs. Maybe they put it on commercials. Obama had t-shirts, hats, stickers of all kinds (bumper and not), signs, billboards, commercials, tablecloths (sort of, whatever you call that thingy they cover the tables at conventions with), and more. Of course, without a product to back it up, it would always be meaningless; but on the flip-side, an unadvertised product never sells, no matter how good it is.

 

I think I agree with much of what you are saying in the last post. The logo is for "Organizing for America," which is Obama's grassroot's network.

 

I think a larger issue here is this: Obama is continuing to do something that Bush started doing in late 2001. His presidency is in constant campaign mode. With catch-phrases and easy to remember slogans, Bush was in constant campaign mode, pretty much from the time of the 9/11 attacks onward. Obama does the same thing with imagery.

I agree that this is a new era in politics - the internet era if you will - because while it may not be anything "new" in the thought process or intent, there has never been a means to distribute such imagery so easily before.

 

I know I'm not an American voter so I'm not the target market, but we get Obama overload down here anyway, and I can honestly say that I have never seen his so-called "icon".