Operation Desert Store : First the Air War, Then the Ground War. Now the Marketing Campaign.

ONE OF THE MOST SECRET OPERATIONS OF THE PERSIAN Gulf War took place last spring on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. This was a clandestine meeting that had been in the works for some time; the two visitors had considered for several weeks beforehand important questions of economics, history and psychology, and if those questions were answered to their satisfaction today by the man they were coming to see, they were prepared to offer him money--large sums of money. More than he could have ever dreamed of just weeks before.

Once inside the penthouse apartment, the visitors could see the security men at their posts outside on the roof. The man the agents were sworn to protect from terrorists, the man the visitors had come to see, was waiting for them in the living room. For several months now his name and face had been in the news nonstop. But not in settings like this. At this moment, he was half a world away from the several hundred thousand combat troops he still commanded. And instead of wearing his familiar, crisp camouflage uniform, today he was dressed in a light-tan business suit. The penthouse belonged to big-shot literary agent Marvin Josephson, and the visitors represented just one of several major publishing houses who would come calling. The man they were here to see was Josephson’s client, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

The meeting lasted about an hour and 15 minutes. Schwarzkopf did most of the talking. The publishing men were impressed by his knowledge of history and his grasp of details. They also knew that although Schwarzkopf had an unrivaled knowledge of the Gulf War’s inside story, as an Army general, he wasn’t hemmed in by the sort of non-disclosure agreement that might constrain a CIA director or even a President. It was Schwarzkopf’s performance at the get-togethers in Josephson’s apartment that landed the general his reported $6-million book contract with Bantam. “Frankness is everything in a celebrity biography,” remarks one publishing executive. “And Schwarzkopf talked a fabulous game. When publishers hear that, dollar signs dance in their heads.”

The Gulf War introduced the public to many new dimensions of modern combat. First there was the air war, which was designed to take out command-and-control; then there was the ground war, dedicated to forcing bunkered-in troops to die or surrender. Now there’s the marketing war, which aims to capture a much wilier adversary: the American consumer.

In this last and, in some ways most aggressive, phase of the war, the Schwarzkopf book deal is merely the loudest salvo. There are at least 30 other Gulf War books either in the bookstores or destined to be there by early next year. There’s Jack Anderson’s quickie Schwarzkopf bio, “Stormin’ Norman.” A Schwarzkopf quote book. A Schwarzkopf book with a foreword by Bob Hope. Even Bantam didn’t just wait for Schwarzkopf to put pen to paper; last May it published what it called an “insider’s view” of the man by two unheralded military officers. Then there’s Bob Woodward’s book that started out as an institutional study of the Pentagon, then was about the invasion of Panama, and finally came out as a Gulf book a month after the Iraqis signed the cease-fire.

There are already a couple of Gulf War anthologies; a book called “How CNN Fought the War” for all those, the press release states, “who want to go behind the scenes of one of America’s greatest military and media triumphs” (Media triumph? Didn’t the Pentagon win that one, too?); a Gulf War question-and-answer book for kids; and-- full disclosure alert-- there’s “Witness to War,” The Times’ own ticktock book.

Make no mistake, this is lightning war. “Before the war was even over we were getting faxes of proposals from agents all over the country,” says Dell’s military books editor, E. J. McCarthy. “We ended up receiving around 100 proposals, compared to about six to 10 for most topics.”

Paul Gottlieb, the head of Abrams, says that normally he must have a year to design and produce a book, but that this spring he put out a Gulf photo collection in four months. “In the dozen years I’ve been here it’s the fastest we’ve ever gone from inception to finished book.”

Until now, the world record for a general writing his autobiography on deadline was Ulysses S. Grant’s; he finished his landmark two-volume memoir in one year. But Grant was only dying of cancer; Schwarzkopf is up against Bantam’s publication schedule. The company wants the book out this time next year, which means that Schwarzkopf and his as yet unannounced ghostwriter have to deliver about eight months from now.

The action’s been equally heavy on the new war’s other fronts--advertising, videos, recreation, TV and movies. And if rushing a big book into print is an understandable consequence of the heat of battle, some of the other maneuvers--like the flag-waving car commercials, the yellow-ribbon-based beer promotions and the hardware-loving movies--are more like atrocities.

DURING WORLD WAR II, WELL BEFORE AN ALLIED victory was assured, product messages that implored the public to “back the attack” were routine. A Lockheed ad of the time showed bombs raining down on a swastika-marked Germany over the credo “Blast the hub and smash the wheel!” An ad for Nash-Kelvinator (in peacetime a maker of cars and refrigerators, in wartime a maker of aircraft components) described the company as “devoted to winning this war.” By contrast, during the five-month-long buildup to Desert Storm, advertisers grew increasingly mute about what was going on. Indeed, once the shooting started, many major accounts canceled scheduled TV spots out of fear that their messages might be juxtaposed with bad news. The new motto seems to have been “Back the attack? We’ll get back to you.”

But once the surprisingly quick and lopsided results were in, get back they did. What a wonderful surprise! What had loomed as a protracted and depressing struggle turned out to be a . . . marketing opportunity.

Dan O’Brien of the J. Walter Thompson agency remembers the beginnings of the new idea for his McDonnell Douglas account. One of the U.S. pilots interviewed on TV referred to all the McDonnell Douglas aircraft involved by calling the Gulf War the “Big Mac attack.” “We thought,” O’Brien recalls, “ ‘How can we use this to maintain awareness of the quality of our product line?’ ” The result was a full-page print ad that ran after the war in the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and many specialty publications. The spread shows two jets zooming over a desert landscape, and the main copy reads, “Every enemy fighter downed in Desert Storm was downed by an aircraft built by McDonnell Douglas. Every single one.” True enough, but what a difference from those World War II ads, in which the product served a larger cause. Here it’s practically the other way around.

The first direct hits of the new war were scored by videotapes. Witness Schwarzkopf’s late-February briefing on the war, as packaged by an Illinois-based company called MPI Home Video working with ABC News. Since the basic material for the tape was available to the producers for free--the briefing, after all, was made by a government employee performing official duties using taxpayer-financed materials--the overhead on the project was spectacularly low. Sales, however, were spectacularly high. “It was a buying frenzy,” says Jaffer Ali, MPI’s vice president of marketing. “The Schwarzkopf video is triple platinum right now. We’ve sold about 185,000 units.” That’s at $19.98 apiece.

Desert Storm has been a big part of the impressive growth in home specialty videos. An outfit in San Antonio, Tex.--White Lion Pictograph, whose previous offerings were two tapes about jets--has sold 200,000 copies of a three-cassette series it started in February called “First Strike: Desert Storm.” Well before the cease-fire, Turner Home Entertainment released a compilation of CNN coverage called “Desert Storm: The War Begins.” In keeping with CNN’s Gulf-based upsurge, that tape has sold more than 350,000 copies. There was a follow-up video on the outcome of the war that has moved 50,000 copies, and now Turner is marketing a six-cassette gift pack that goes for “only” $99.98.

Last August, PolyGram Video and NBC News announced an agreement to jointly produce topical home videos. The press release begins this way: “Two-Part Desert Storm Series to Be Initial Product Offering.” The Pentagon’s Lt. Col. Steve Titunik, who works with companies trying to find military footage, told the Hollywood Reporter recently that he knew of requests for Desert Storm-related material from at least 35 different projects.

“WE’RE GOING TO HAVE 750 OR SO SERVICEMEN, A Patriot missile, Apache helicopters and Humvees,” says Joe Castor. What’s this, a quick assault back into Iraq? Well, no--Castor is the marketing director for the Phoenix Cardinals football team, and he’s talking about the halftime show at the opening game of the Cardinals preseason.

At the game, there were also M-60 machine guns set up on tripods in sandbag emplacements, an ejection-seat display and a simulated tactical aid station for wounded troops. The Cardinals’ press release wasn’t very coy about all this: “The Cardinals/ Patriots game will be wrapped in the American flag.” There were free tickets for Desert Storm veterans (“order forms require proof of deployment to the Persian Gulf or activation orders”), and the coin flip was presided over by Arizona’s lone Desert Storm POW. Trend spotters, take note--a POW coin flip was also the way the New York Giants started their preseason opener.

The world’s largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch, mobilized its forces by declaring free admission to the company’s theme parks between Armed Forces Day and Labor Day for service personnel and their families, and by establishing the $1.2 million August A. Busch Jr. Desert Storm Scholarship Fund. The company called the whole package “Yellow Ribbon Summer.” Although Anheuser-Busch would probably prefer that you didn’t do the math, that $1.2 million is one-ten-thousandth of the revenues the company took in last year alone.

And what would a war be without war toys? “In just 1,100 hours in the early months of 1991, the American-led Allied forces achieved the swiftest and most decisive military victory in modern history! Can you do as well?” That’s the question posed by a board game about the Persian Gulf called “Line in the Sand.” The game, brought to you by TSR Inc., manufacturers of Dungeons & Dragons, did about a year’s worth of business in its first three months and is still going strong. It features such scorekeeping devices as a War Fever Gauge and a Jihad Gauge.

TSR updated the game twice to reflect the actual course of the fighting. The “Victory Edition” allows the Iraq player to fire SCUD missiles at Israel and Saudi Arabia and to create oil spills but also makes it likely that Iraqi resistance will crumble quickly. The rule book admits that “these rule modifications will make the game as one-sided as the war was. Finding a friend who actually wishes to be the Iraqi player under these circumstances may be a difficult task.”

Two days before the American International Toy Fair in New York City last February, Bernard Paul, the president of International Hobby Corp., was looking through his company’s catalogue when he made a discovery that excited him tremendously: “Oh my God, we’ve got SCUD missiles in here!” Paul had a special press release made up about the SCUD model kit, and as a result, his booth at the show was packed. The company’s sales of SCUD kits quickly went up tenfold. The SCUD is now International Hobby’s best-selling item (second-best is the Abrams tank), and Paul says the company’s overall sales have “doubled or tripled” since the war.

The world’s largest maker of plastic model kits, Revell/ Monogram, experienced a similar sales surge in the wake of the war. As soon as the fighting started, the company slapped a red, white and blue sticker with the logo “Aircraft of Desert Storm” on its models of the planes involved. The company’s Stealth fighter kit moved especially well; its sales soared to five times prewar levels. Apparently, an unexpected gold rush like that is even more disorienting than model glue fumes. In announcing the donation of models to children of service personnel sent to the Gulf, the company press release stated: “According to New York City family therapist Bonnie Eaker-Weil, the model kits can serve as effective play therapy tools for the children who receive them.”

So just imagine the healing powers of Larami Corporation’s “Operation: Desert Patrol” deluxe play set. With this, a kid could really draw a line in the sandbox. The set includes an M-16 rifle, vest, helmet, belt, canteen, knife, sheath and two hand grenades, all done up in desert camouflage. And what better way to pass the time while the diplomats fail than by exchanging Topps Desert Storm trading cards?

“Hey, you got doubles on that Patriot--I’ll give you a CH-53 and a Bradley fighting vehicle for it.”

“No way! The Bradley had a lousy war!”

“THE INDOMITABLE SPIRIT THAT IS CONTRIBUTING to this victory for world peace and justice is the same spirit that gives us the power and the potential to meet our toughest challenges at home,” George Bush declared during his wartime State of the Union speech last January. “We are resolute and resourceful.”

“The war was fundamentally appealing to people,” says Mark Crispin Miller, a professor of media studies at Johns Hopkins University, who is working on a book about the Gulf conflict as spectacle, “because it seemed to demonstrate American efficacy, which had been in question. Since advertising always seeks to make people feel good in the easiest, cheapest way, it seized at once on the air war.”

Just a few weeks after Bush’s speech, the airline America West met its toughest challenge--selling more tickets--by dressing up Schwarzkopf look-alike Jonathan Winters in desert camouflage and combat watch, sticking him behind a podium and having him announce in both television and print ads that America West had achieved “air superiority.” Meanwhile, ABC News was cooking up a flash campaign to tout its Gulf War coverage. What did they come up with? A shot of Koppel, Donaldson and the network’s other leading talking heads under the line “Air Supremacy.”

You want resolute? You want resourceful? Then forget the Miller Lite All-Stars spot with Bob Uecker telling Desert Storm vets, “You can have my front-row seat any time.” Forget the Chrysler commercial imploring import car owners to embrace American cars again while the screen shows a girl hugging a returning Desert Storm soldier. Even forget the flier I got in the mail from Time-Life Books telling me that if I bought the first in a series of military books right now, I would “get Desert Storm absolutely free.”

Go right to Mark Messing of the ad agency Scali, McCabe, Sloves (he has since moved on to J. Walter Thompson). It seems that his client, carpet maker Allied-Signal, had come up with a breakthrough crush-resistant fiber, and he was on the lookout for a dramatic way to illustrate its performance. “We put on our thinking caps to come up with publicity stunts,” Messing explains. “We were thinking about carpeting Grand Central Station when a PR agency I work with, Cohen & Wolfe, said we should consider doing something with the ‘Operation Welcome Home’ parade” then being planned for New York City. With the Department of Defense’s go-ahead, Allied Signal became a sponsor of last June’s giant victory parade--in return for permission to lay down 120 square feet of its new carpet across the parade route. The result? A television commercial about how well the stuff stood up to the 25,000 returning Desert Storm warriors who walked all over it. The ad was, as Advertising Age columnist Bob Garfield observed, “the Mother of all Product Demos.”

Are ads like these an exploitation of patriotism? Messing insists that “our interest was simply in finding a bunch of feet and trucks and other abusive stuff that would show that the carpet would bounce back. We were not interested in tapping into patriotism.” When you press marketeers about their use of Desert Storm, that is pretty much what you get. But Madison Avenue’s body language doesn’t always match its party line.

Consider AM General, the company that manufactures the Humvee, the Army’s jeep replacement, which was used heavily during the Gulf War. Last June, AM General announced that next year it will begin selling a variant of the vehicle to the general public. Sue Carney, AM General’s manager of public relations, says that the company doesn’t know yet if it will use Desert Storm references when it begins marketing, and emphasizes that the special commemorative plates that will come on the first 1,000 vehicles will not mention the conflict. Then I ask her what color the Humvee will be offered in. The answer? “Sand Tan.”

Similarly, the publicists at 20th Century Fox say their hit movie “Hot Shots” has hardly anything to do with Desert Storm. But how about the film’s trailer? You know--the one that described the picture as “the mother of all movies” and said that the cast included “Saddam Hussein as himself.” The one that showed the Iraqi dictator taking one of our bombs right in his lap.

IF THE MAKERS OF “HOT SHOTS” COULD HAVE HELD off a little longer, they would have had even more to make fun of. Next week ABC will be out with a made-for-television movie, “The Heroes of Desert Storm,” that was shot in even less time than the real war took--22 days.

“We didn’t want to tell a political story,” says Alan Sabanson, the executive in charge of movies and miniseries for ABC. “We didn’t want to tell the story of why this war occurred--could this war have been avoided and what are the politics and dynamics of the Middle East. It’s not a controversial script. It is a tribute to the American fighting men and women.” The script synopsis includes lines like “Top guns Lt. Tom Slade and Lt. Devon Jones board their fighter-bomber on U.S.S. Saratoga carrier to join the action.”

The project has received full Department of Defense cooperation, meaning that military stock footage was made available--including selections from the 600 hours of combat video that the Pentagon made during Desert Storm--and that parts of it were shot on military bases. The production company purchased the rights to the stories of many Desert Storm participants and hired as its technical adviser wartime Pentagon briefer Lt. Gen. Thomas Kelly.

“The network wanted to put this on at the beginning of the season,” a spokesman for the project’s production company tells me. “They think there’s going to be a tremendous appetite for this. You have to remember that when General Schwarzkopf was on with Barbara Walters, that was one of the highest ratings the show ever had!” (For the record, that broadcast was “20/20’s” second-highest rating for the season; it got beat out by a segment on exorcism.)

“Heroes” will be the first extended treatment of the Gulf War to reach viewers. It will not be the last. The Discovery Channel, for instance, is working on a series on the air war called “Wings Over the Gulf.” The channel is planning to air the show sometime next January--in sync with the first anniversary of the war.

Then there is “Desert Storm--the Movie,” an independent production from an outfit called Patriotic Films, headed up by a former Steven Spielberg assistant named Eric Hansen. The film is described as an action-adventure movie about a Stealth fighter pilot. “I was working as a broker on a real estate limited partnership deal when the war broke out,” associate producer A. J. Ferrara tells me. “I knew someone was going to capitalize on Desert Storm as soon as it started. Eric had gotten ahold of some outtakes from ‘TopGun’ and was trying to figure out a way to do something with them, but when the war came out, he said, ‘Hey, why not make a film featuring the Stealth fighter!’ ”

Ferrara says that next “we whipped out the screenplay and went to the American people to raise the money. We’ve got mom-and-pop investors and heavy hitters. We told them we want you to show your support for the American people.” Ferrara gleefully reels off some of the companies he says have supported the project. There’s Lockheed, which Ferrara says was an early and eager supporter of the movie. “Lockheed gave us the most incredible Stealth fighter footage you’ve ever seen,” he proclaims. “And it’s a substantial part of the movie. We got stuff from them that will cost another movie company millions.”

And there’s General Motors with its technical assistance concerning an armored vehicle it makes; there’s Raytheon--for its help with the Patriot missile, “and Miller Beer--they gave us lots of suds; Ray-Ban--we got some beautiful sunglasses. And L.A. Gear. And we got great support from Sav-Mor Car Rental in Las Vegas--thank you, Jennifer and Norm Jenkins! Also, the staff at the Bourbon St. Hotel and the state ranger at Valley of Fire Park.”

And--shades of Yellow Ribbon Summer--Ferrara says that if the movie makes any money, there are plans to make a donation to Middle East relief organizations and to set up a scholarship fund for the kids of those who died in Desert Storm. “It all meshes and jells together so sweetly that it’s got to work.” Ferrara concludes. “Good things can happen from a war, if you’re a smart person. I’ll be honest--it’s a business move. This is America, right?”

When I call the man at General Motors who Ferrara had mentioned, he says that no armored vehicles have been provided to the project. When I call Lockheed, I get an even stronger response. Jim Ragsdale, director of communications for the Lockheed division that made the Stealth fighter, says that Lockheed decided not to provide any production support to “Desert Storm--the Movie” because the Department of Defense chose not to. He says at least one sticking point was that the script calls for a Stealth fighter to get shot down; because that didn’t happen during Desert Storm, the Air Force is adamant about portrayals to the contrary.

What about the “incredible Stealth fighter footage” that Ferrara says Lockheed provided? It turns out to be an minute videotape made in the United States before Desert Storm that the company distributed widely last year. The quality of the video is well below that required for a motion picture, Ragsdale says, and Lockheed has declined to make any of its considerable movie footage of the plane available to Patriotic Films.

In spite of all this, why does Patriotic Films keep saying that Lockheed is substantially supporting “Desert Storm--the Movie”? “Maybe,” offers Ragsdale, “that’s how you get financing for a film.”

ONE NATURAL QUEStion to ask about desert Storm marketing is, “Does it have legs?” The consensus on this seems to be that the trend is past its peak but will stay strong in selected markets through Christmas. But much more important questions are: “Does it have a brain?” and “Does it have a heart?”

General Schwarzkopf was trying to get at this point himself in his famous briefing when he said of the battle he was describing, “It’s not a Nintendo game.” Well, it is now. Microprose Software just came out with “F-15 Strike Eagle” for Nintendo sets (retail price: $49.95). According to the company, the game is “your chance to pilot the powerful jet on dangerous missions in the Persian Gulf. Locate and destroy chemical warfare plants, blast entrenched positions along fortified border regions, lead an assault force against the enemy’s capital city--and many more thrilling adventures await . . .”

The trouble is that none of those adventures have to do with mistakenly bombed civilians, or troop deaths from “friendly” fire, or starving Kurds--problems of the war that while hardly marketable are something else: real.