 I think we have a quorum, so we'll go ahead and get started. Thank you for adhering to our wishes and coming back in. And there'll be plenty of food and beverages throughout the day, so hopefully you won't feel like you just missed a little bit. So what I'd like to do is we'd like to hear now from our second panel. And that will be chaired by Mr. Peter Loach, who's the vice president of our external relations here at USIP. Peter, over to you. Great, thanks so much. Thanks. And greetings to everybody online. Air subtle noted, there are three elements to a speech. There's the speaker, there's the subject, and there's the audience. And the last of these is the most important. With that in mind, the speakers have all promised to be brief, and I have promised to be mean if they are not, so that we can actually engage a conversation. And of course, it'll be the subject. A lot of the presentations is the focus on the audience. Almost apropos of nothing, but close enough to Warren mentioning. So over the weekend, I was reading a novel by, again, Julian Barnes, an English author. The book is Flavère's Parrot, which is nominally about Flavère. And apparently Gustave Flavère, the noted author, among many other things he hated was trains. Apparently trains just really, I don't know, it's not his thing. And he wrote that the problem with trains is the rare way would merely permit more people to move about, meet, and be stupid together. Could not help but think of social media. My job here is to set up, keep the conversation going, and get you on with your day, and especially since we're right before lunch. With that in mind, I'm going to introduce the panelists, introduce their bios, have a few other introductory comments, and then turn it over. In order of speaking, our first speaker is going to be Dr. Christina Lange, Senior Program Advisor and Senior Fellow at the Geneva Center for Security Policy in Switzerland. She has more than a 20-year career history and security policy, lectured at universities, military academies, international organizations in over 20 countries on subjects related to countering violent extremism, terrorism, trains, national organized crime. At the Geneva Center, she directs several short courses within the Emergency Security Challenges Program on foresight and strategic planning, building national strategy for countering violent extremism. To her left is John Haber, a friend and colleague who's president of Cascade Strategy. Prior to that, he was CEO of the American Association for Justice, formerly known as the Association of Trial Lawyers, a reposition to revitalize the organization. He's also been a senior partner of Fleischman-Hillard, the world's largest public relations, public affairs, and marketing company. He served in the Clinton administration, a special counsel to the president for the Overseas Private Investment Corp. He was chief of staff, general counsel for Senator Dianne Feinstein, General Counselor Communications Director for Senator Patrick Leahy on the Community and Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry. He's also in the graduate faculty at Georgetown University, where he teaches courses in things like strategic communication. To his left is an old friend, Sarah Coppersmith. Sarah is a vice president of Scott Circle Communications. She's an award-winning communications professional. She joins Scott Circle from Partnership for a Healthier America, an independent nonprofit created in conjunction with, but independent from, First Lady Michelle Obama's Let's Move campaign. She served as press secretary for US representative Harry Mitchell of Arizona. She's worked with the Women's Campaign International, assisting with work in emerging democracies, post-conflict regions that advance opportunities for women to actively participate in public advocacy and political processes. And at Scott Circle, her clients have included, among many others, the United States Institute of Peace. Welcome back, Sarah. In trying to figure out the logistics of this panel, she actually bypassed me entirely and simply went to the people with whom she worked when she was a consultant for us. Strategic communications is much more like explaining a tomato than killing a vampire. My phrase, I'm sure you've heard. Killing a vampire is easy. Wooden stake to the heart, vampire vanishes. That's how it happens in Black for the Vampire Slayer. I have no reason to believe that's not how it happens otherwise. Describing a tomato is trickier. You could describe the pH balance, the flavor, the history, where it's grown, all sorts of things. That's much more like the challenge of strategic communications, right? It's a complicated beast. The language of communications, the language of rhetoric, semiotics, metaphor, and the role in creating more, creating peace, getting people to join war, getting people to mobilize their peace is thousands of years old. It was first written about arguably, in Thucydides, the history of the Peloponnesian War. Aristotle noted that it's importance, Plato, and notably actually the Sophists talked about the importance of learning language to communicate, to be an effective member of a society. Here in the United States, rhetoric has played a role in the nation before it was a nation. John Adams, in a letter, what do we mean by the revolution, the war that was no part of the revolution? It was only an effect and consequence of it. The revolution was in the minds of the people and was affected from 1760 to 1775, in the course of 15 years before a drop of blood was shed at Lexington. The records of 13 legislatures, the pamphlets, newspapers, and the colonies ought to be consulted during that period to ascertain the steps by which the public opinion was enlightened and informed concerning the authority of parliament over the colonies. The medium of the time was pamphleteers, was pamphlets, people would hand out pamphlets, nail them to trees, all of that. George Orwell, the noted essayist and critic, wrote in the pamphlets of the time that one has complete freedom of expression in a pamphlet, including if one chooses the freedom to be scurrilous, abusive, and seditious. A pamphlet could be in prose or in verse, it consists largely of maps or statistics or quotations, it can take the form of a story, a fable, a letter, an essay, a dialogue, or a piece of reportage. All that is required is that it should be topical, polemical, and short. Take out the word pamphlet and drop it in the word blog, vine, tweet, almost anything else, it's the same. One of the differences, of course, is the new media. Facebook is faster, Twitter is faster, social media are faster. So in many ways, the challenges we face as strategic communicators are older than the nation state by more than a thousand years, but as recent as several years ago. With that in mind, I'll turn it over to our, here's how we're gonna work conceptually. Talk specifically about challenges with combating ISIS and ISIL and social media there, and then back up to a broader strategic communications context with John and Sarah. And again, I'm gonna keep folks short, and I will in fact cut people off if they run long. So thank you. Thank you. Please. Ladies and gentlemen, dear organizers, thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak today. Today, I would like to talk about strategic communications. What are the best practices today? And in order to that, we need to look at one of the greatest strategic communicators in the field today, the Islamic State. They are a huge threat as are transnational terrorism groups all over the world, and they are now facing, we peace building and peace making organizations are facing this new transnational threat. So in order to show you how they do their strategic communications, I thought it would be best since it is their grievances that they're carrying, their feedback loop that has been left because of the void that has been left in places like Syria and Iraq, the war that's are still unanswered. And it is here that we need to look at our way of strategic communications. How can we create digital peacekeepers to go up against the digital caliphate? So just to highlight a little bit of their excellence in strategic messaging, I'm just gonna highlight some of their strengths. So first of all, one of the ways that we have to understand how to counter the message is to look at how terrorists learn. There was a fantastic study done by Rand in 2005 that outlined how the ways the terrorists across the globe used the learning curve and how they share ideas and how it shapes certain outcomes. As you can see, knowledge and political violence can be used as an intelligence tool and intelligence can be used for building the best messages. So we also have to work on our intelligence in the field. What's interesting is terrorists are considered a social but in fact they are very social and they harness this sociability. We may be able to formulate the right messages. When you look at this chart, you can see this was done by Rand in 2005 and it sees how groups are organized, managed and connected. And in order for us to understand that thoroughly, it is a way for us to formulate our counter message. When we look at the way the Islamic State works on its strategic messaging, we see that war is constantly staged online. We are fighting a kinetic war but we are not engaging the enemy in the digital field. And I think we are trying but we're failing at it. We don't have a story. They have a story. They're using Facebook and Twitter in order to hurt our morale. They're using psyops operations. They're using YouTube to demonstrate first the horror of war but also to use it as a psychological weapon. It shows also the brotherhood in war, the sisterhood in war. And they also use it as a tool. Anwar Alaki is one of the biggest threats to us in terms of strategic messaging. And if you can see, he's a Yemeni-American who was droned and he used also tactical ways to use for strategic messaging. For example, his Inspire magazines were used to show how terrorism can be tactically operated. And if you look at just one Inspire magazine, the exact clock that was used for the Times Square bombing was featured in the Inspire magazine. So they're also using magazines for tactical operations. You saw with the Tsarnav brothers how the Inspire magazine on how to create a bomb in your mother's kitchen using a pressure cooker bomb was also inspired by Anwar Alaki's magazine, Inspire. As you can see here, the cupcakes, that was actually a Canadian effort to change the recipe into a cupcake recipe. Unfortunately, a lot of the Inspire magazines are still available online and none of all the actual recipes have been changed into cupcake recipes. They also have magazines and books that are available. If you look at amazon.com just a couple years ago, you could actually buy a book called Encyclopedia of Jihad. It was $12.95 and people actually went to Amazon and bought it online. So they even have books that are featured on an Amazon that are available and ready for use. And here you can see how to organize and run a cell, how to plan and carry out attacks, how to use a gun and make a bomb, and also how to rally sympathizers to the cause. So they actually have a book on strategic messaging. What's interesting about Anwar Alaki has been drone, but his postcards still live on in a sense that he's still very widely seen and used on the web. There's still the 44 ways to conduct Jihad that are still available online and you can still access freely. So now if you look at, we move on to the Islamic State. Here you see again, strategic messaging very, very strong. They have glossy magazines. They have messages, they have a key story. They're basically saying it's important that you come now to do religious migration. You have to hasten, you have to rush before the opportunity closes. And they have even gendered their approach. It's like a new startup company. They've looked at how women and girls and boys and even children can be rallied to the cause. And if you look at, for example, men, they're basically saying, hey, you look, we can offer you a caliphate. We can give you a passport. We can give you an identity, a job, and religious fulfillment, even brotherhood. For girls, and they're basically targeting young teenage girls, we can offer you romance, sisterhood, a life with a jihadi fighter, a possible life as a wife of a martyr, even IT skills. They have glossy magazines to do their strategic messaging. Their first magazine was basically come to the caliphate. It's here, it's waiting for you. And the second one, the flood was basically Noah's Ark. Using the metaphor of Noah's Ark, if you don't come now, you're gonna die in the flood. We are the Ark, come find us. And hasten to do migration was the third magazine. The fourth one was the failed crusade, basically highlighting the crusade by the coalition forces was failing and that they were still remaining and expanding. And now they have a new magazine that is basically showing where they all want to go in terms of expansion. Where are our magazines? What are we saying? What is our story? And you can see they have basically physical control before in their part of the country in Iraq and Syria where they are basically taking physical control before they actually create political and religious authority. And their religious argumentation is rigorous and comprehensive. Unfortunately, it's seventh century religious argumentation which as many Muslim scholars have now argued is no longer legitimate. They also have an apocalypse narrative. They're basically saying come, the end is near. And come before it's too late. These are their weapons of war. They have basically accessed all the tools that we use for our daily communication and our social media. They use Google, Instagram, Second Life, Facebook. These are the tools that they use. They are quick. They can turn on a dime. We are sclerotic and slow. We're bureaucrats, bureaucracies. In their answer to Nussans to Charlie, they said ISIS, we are all ISIS. This happened within hours of the Nussans to Charlie campaign. So they are quick, they are agile. They have a quick answer to everything that we try to accomplish. At the same time, they're all embracing. They're going after the low hanging fruit. They're basically saying we are redeemable. Come to us, we can give you the best, a new life, a new start. They're embracing criminals. At the same time, they're providing games. Games for young boys who get addicted to games like Grand Theft Auto. They have a Grand Theft Auto game which they have put online. So they're basically providing games for children to become addicted to their message. They're also calling other people to come. They're not just going after the low hanging fruit or the criminals. They're actually trying to get doctors and engineers and specialists and scholars. And they're calling them all to come to the new caliphate. At the same time, if you failed a wannabe doctor and you didn't get into medical school, they're basically saying come to Mosul. We can offer you medical school. We can offer you the latest technology. Their ISHS looks very much like the National Health Service in the UK. They even use the same logo. Basically, they're saying we're here to help you. We're benevolence. We will give you free health care if you come to our country. So how do we counter this strong strategic messaging? We've tried very hard. We've created the Center for Strategic Counterterrorism Communications at the US State Department. The UK contest strategy has been around since 2003. They're trying very hard to prevent people from going. We even have a new UN Security Council resolution in 2178 that was adopted, making all countries now, they must now all have a way to stop foreign fighters of leaving. And if they do come back, they have to have strategies on how to rehabilitate them. But these are all very difficult and hard to implement. How do we prevent terrorism? Well, we look at communities, we look at religious organizations, we look at international organizations. I wrote a piece on strategic messaging by the cyber jihad and I looked at all the NGOs that are currently in the world that are available to do this kind of work. And they're formidable and they're a lot, but they're not talking together. There's no unified message on counting violent extremism. In order to prevent or stop the kinetic war, we have to work on the underbelly of this iceberg. If you look at it, it's if we kill the people that are actually fighting the wars and the kinetic wars, they will constantly be rejuvenated by new foreign fighters. So unless we actually work on the bottom of the iceberg and stop what is feeding the violence, we will not move ahead. And as you see, we have many different ways to approach this, but we need to have a unified story, a unified message, a counter message to extremism. We have a lot of ammunition. They are as IS or Dias or ISL or whatever you wanna call them are destroying our human rights. They're the lowest form of humanity. They are not human in a sense. They are decapitating our humanity. They're not only decapitating our humanity, they're decapitating the heritage of our humanity as this Jordanian cartoonist so wonderfully displayed. And we have lots of ammunition to counter their strategic message, but we're failing to find a unified way to do so. So my key arguments are basically terrorists today are delivering a sophisticated and effective communication strategy. They are strategically recruiting young women, young men via the internet. We need to defend this new frontier. We are worried about the kinetic war, but we are not engaged in the cyber war, the cyber caliphate that they are creating. We are not engaging with them. We are not countering their message. We need to better address the roots of radicalization, otherwise they will constantly have a new flow of recruits that will come towards them. And we need to create new and better counter narratives. Thank you so much for your attention. And just one last thing, our strong messages are basically peace, not war. And if you look at peace building and peacemaking, we have so many lessons we can teach them and they're not effective at all, but we don't have a unified counter messages. And that's why we're here today to work on it. And that's what leads us to the next experts who will show us the way forward. Thank you for your attention. So John, Sarah, you've been presented with 2,000 years of history of strategic communications and a very immediate case study that's very present. Back it up a bit, explain messaging. In general, what do we need to know? How do we go at this problem and problems of strategic communication in general? Great. I hope you don't mind. I'm gonna stand, when I teach my grad students, if I sit down, they will all immediately go to sleep. Not that you all will, but Sarah and I are gonna do a little bit of a presentation. Can I stand here? You stand wherever you like. I can stand around around. So I'm gonna start it off and then Sarah will talk and then I'll sort of wrap it up. But what we wanna talk to you today really is about five sort of key, keys to success on strategic communications. But let me take one step back. How many of you have one of these things? Probably everybody in the room. How many of you like your iPhone? It's really changed our life. We forget the iPhone has been around about seven and a half years, not our lifetimes. A blink in the eye of world history. We forget sometimes that I work for a guy named Howard Dean who ran for president. He sort of changed the way American politics was done. That was 11 years ago. When Howard Dean ran for president, Facebook was at one university. YouTube hadn't been invented. Twitter didn't exist. Much of the sort of social media that we see today and which sort of drives us and we think is so critical and so important wasn't there. But what this phone tells us and what studies will show us and folks like the Pew Center on People and the Press is that there's an enormous hunger for information. More people today read the New York Times that they ever have before. Now we all know the newspapers are having a tremendous time staying in business. But more people are reading them because they're hungry. Anyone know why newspapers are going out of business? Craigslist. Newspapers used to make all their money on classified ads. Well if you have Craigslist, why do you need a classified ad anymore? That is really undermined sort of the newspaper industry. That's had a ripple effect. Most of the reporters that you see now covering whether it's world events or American politics are fairly new to the system. Their editors are fairly new. In American politics, three or four presidential cycles ago, the same people covered each and every cycle, they knew what was gonna happen. Today, the people that are covering the business have really not written about politics before. There's a great little article about the lead political reporter on Hillary Clinton's campaign. This is her second presidential before that she didn't know anything about politics when she was first covering. Nothing wrong with that. But it just means the news and information, the analysis that you get and you depend on where there comes through a written and I bet you a lot of you actually get hard newspapers, right? My students don't. But you actually get a newspaper that you hold in your hand. Whether you get it through there or you get it through your phone, what's happening to you is, it's being written by people that don't have the same full sense. So I would challenge any of you. The next time you read an article on a subject you know a great deal about, I bet you find yourself shaking your head most of the way through the article because they don't quite get it right. That's what's sort of happening in the world. So whether it's about ISIS or other places, we have to be very aware that the way we communicate is both very different because we have social media and digital media but it's actually quite the same and some of the basics are the same. If this was a sports game, we would say don't forget your blocking and tackling. I know it's a football analogy but you wanna remember the basics. Whether you're in the military and you teach new recruits, you teach them the basics. So we're gonna talk about the basics today and we'll talk a little bit about the tactics as well. So the one thing I wanna just leave you with before I hand it over to Sarah we'll go through the five rules is this is a very dynamic world. My colleague here, one of the right points she made about ISIS is they move very, very quickly. Quickly could be measured in a matter of under an hour, under a half hour, 10 or 15 minutes. It's an incredibly dynamic situation. It would be if we fought a war and we made a movement and then we waited two or three months to decide what our next movement is. For those of you who've been battle and I never have but you know how fast and how dynamic and the right commanders understand how to marshal their forces to take advantage of their opponent's weakness. So communications is dynamic. It involves usually two sides, sometimes one side in the ISIS situation is doing a better job than the other side but it's a very dynamic situation and we have to keep our eye on the ball on certain things. So why don't we start off talking about those sort of five keys to success. Great, thanks John. So we're gonna now go over some general frameworks that Justice John mentioned can be used quickly, can be planned ahead of time so that no matter what crisis you're trying to battle through communications or program you're trying to roll out, you're prepared and you're thinking strategically about the program you're gonna do. So the first key is to define success. The biggest mistake people can make is that they won't define success before starting. So what you'll get is this, you'll sort of go around and around and I'm there. Think about what you want to do before you start and then write it down. Write down everything and I always do communication plans for my clients because I want to remember everything. I want to remember what we define success as. I want to know who our audience is. I want to all know what our goal is. So we're all working off the same plan. There's a path forward, we have a timeline and there's priorities. The next key is knowing who your audience is. There are many audiences and you have to really figure out which one is key to your success. Who are you trying to impact? Who's gonna make that difference that you're actually trying to get for your goal, for your success? So these folks on this next slide, yep, so media, government, ISIS, those probably aren't your main audience. Maybe your main audience is local aid workers or it's youth before they join ISIS or maybe it's youth that have already become interested in ISIS and you're trying to combat that. Figuring out what your audience is is the key to figuring out your message. So you may want to engage reporters, engage the government, engage academia. They all influence your key audience but they're not your ultimate audience. So remembering who you're speaking to, who you need to actually persuade to get your success is very important. The next key is I think John and I would agree maybe one of the most important and I think Peter as well, strategy drives your tactics. So first you have to outline your goals and objectives which are what do you need to do? What are you trying to change? Is it lesson recruits into ISIS? Is it garner more funding for a certain peacekeeping effort? What are you trying to do? Then you can outline your strategy which is how to do it. How are you going to stop youth from being interested in ISIS? How are you going to get local actors on the ground to support a bill that then gets passed in Congress or in a local legislature? And then from there you can sort of outline your tactics which are the tools to make it happen. Tools can be social media, tools can be an op-ed, tools can be a speech, tools can be talking on a panel. What does your audience read? What do they listen to? How do they get their information? That's exactly what you need to figure out to sort of create your tools and tactics so that you're actually impacting your goals and objectives in reaching your audience. So one thing I know that John and I want to distress is that social media is a tactic but not the end all and be all. Just like John said, we didn't have iPhones 10 years ago and we didn't have Facebook even 10 years ago. So though social media is really key right now and a really great tactic that should always be incorporated into a strategic communications plan, it's not the only thing that should be done. There's digital outreach, there's traditional outreach that all should be executed and thought about to make sure that you're reaching your audience because though you might want to reach youth, the youth aren't on Twitter as much anymore. So figuring out what are they on, what are they listening to, what are they reading to really impact them, then you can start to create your own message. So let's talk about, so we know what success is, we know where our audience is and we have a sense about our strategy. Then we begin to think about, and people use these words, messages, what's your message? Sometimes they use and think about what your brand is, but it's important to remember that everything you do communicates, everything. We often think if we go back to World War II, you might hear Winston Churchill, it was the words, it was the language, it was the things that he said. A great speech today can move people, can motivate people, can change the way people are. Peter mentioned that I used to run a group of trial lawyers, probably some of the least liked human beings in the system. They're the kind of people when you're at a garden party and what do you do, I'm a trial lawyer, the person kind of moves away from you. We realized through testing that people felt very differently about the word attorney than they felt about the word lawyer. In fact, they liked the word attorney three and a half times more than they liked the word lawyer and it's this dramatic, my attorney is positive, that lawyer. So if you understand the language and the words, if you use the word lawyer all the time, you're gonna start off in the whole, actually what's better than attorney or lawyer is to not use either words, but words and language and using words that are understandable, that are five cent words, the small words, not the big convoluted words. I always say it's the words my mother will understand or my aunt will understand. It's meaningful and it resonates quickly. The second part is your tonality, how you talk, how you sound. You know, there's some people, you listen to them give speeches and they yell into microphones and there's some people that speak very quietly into microphones. Some of those quiet speakers are far more powerful because they know how to modulate their voice. Images are of critical importance too. If I were here in shorts and sandals and I didn't shave in for a week, you probably would give me a little bit less credibility. Maybe you're not giving me much now, but you give me less credibility than if I come in a suit and a tie. So it's how you look. We have a candidate that's running for president now, Rand Paul. If I were working for him, I would make him cut his hair once a week because he has crazy hair. It's not his fault, but it sort of plays into an image of what kind of person he is. Images are important when it sort of fits into personal appearance as well. The right kind of colors and different, this becomes more challenging when you're communicating to different audiences in different countries because the colors that might work in one country might mean something else somewhere else. The hand gestures mean something. So this goes back to again, who your audience is and it's all about the audience and how we're moving the audience. And lastly, it's a symbolism. Does a flag sail patriotism? Do you have an individual standing and have a group of people behind them which suggests popularity? Again, it goes back to who your audience is and how you're trying to communicate to your audience, but everything we do communicates. It's just not about words. And the other thing to remember that, it happens in an instant. Malcolm Gladwell wrote this book which is of somewhat dubious social science, but it's kind of one of his fun books. It's called Blank. He's the kind of person that should basically write an article for The New Yorker and then he turns it into a book, so it sells more. But what he says, and there's a lot of truth to this, we make up our mind in an instant. Think about the next time you meet someone and you get a firm handshake, you feel a little differently than if you get kind of a limpy handshake. It's a very quick way that we make decisions. For those of you who have interviewed people for jobs, you probably decided in the first three or four minutes if you're gonna hire that person. You just have to go through a half hour interview to make it look good. So we decide things very, very quickly. And that's pretty important. So the last thing let's talk about is messages and we're happy, hopefully it'll be enough of a dialogue, we can talk about these and some other rules as well. Everybody goes, what's a message all about? It's really, it's a one sentence way and by the way, the great thing about communications, there's no one black letter law, there's no one right way to do it. This is we're affecting human beings and different people react differently. But it is a set of statements that prompt a targeted audience to take a desired action. So it's usually language, could be images too, that prompt your targeted audience, the audience that Sarah was talking about to do something that you want them to do. That's what it's all about. It's really that simple. It has to have something in it for the audience and it has to have something in it for you. So here's some sort of little ways that we think a lot about it. Perhaps the biggest mistake on messages is people focus on the process, not the impact. So if I wanna talk to you about Google for example, and I start droning on about how many computers and switches they have, you're gonna, I'm gonna lose you in seconds. You care about Google because it changes the way we communicate. It's the impact of what they do, not the process of how we do it. And for a lot of you, for what you're doing, your peacekeeping, you're trying to sell impact, not the process. We work hard doing this. No one cares how hard you work. They care about the impact. The second thing is focus on the heart, not the brain. We think with our hearts. We react very quickly and we react emotionally. And when we see information that is counter to what our feeling is, we come up with all sorts of rationalization to justify our feelings. Think about it's the emotion and that reaches people much more quickly. Your message is really part of two things. It's what you want and what your audience wants. And where there's an overlap. Think of two circles, like a Venn diagram. The place in the middle is the nexus of what both you want your audience to do and what their motivation, what their desires are. That's a sweet spot for messaging. It's not what you care about. It's the twin thing. You short understandable words. You wanna make it easy, succinct. People can understand very quickly. It's not your emotions. You know, you'll constantly see quotes. These are, I am outraged that this has happened. I am saddened. No one cares that I'm sad or outraged. Who cares? Stick with your message that really drives home the most persuasive argument. And you wanna align your language and your images. If you're talking about young people, don't have a 60 year old person talking about what young people feel. Have a young person. Have a student. You know, you want the images to be aligned with what you say. So those are a few things just to sort of begin to think about in terms of messaging. And that's sort of our opening. Great, thank you all very much. Thank you. Before we go to questions from the audience, what I would like, I wanna take the moderator's prerogative and ask the first one. First I wanna thank all of you and congratulate you on driving home the difference between strategy and tactics. Everybody wants to do strategic communication and their first got reactions to issue a press release which is actually kind of a bad tactic that's not been terribly well thought out. So thank you all for driving that home. All three of you talked about the importance of audience and of course that was the heart of Aristotle. I mean, this is not a new concept but how do you define the audience? And Sarah, I think you're the one who said that the press isn't your audience. Why not? Well, what are you trying to do? Let's say you're trying to get a bill passed in Congress. Press can write about it but if you convince every New York Times reporter to vote for the congressman to then vote for that bill that's not the best direct or most direct way to get there. So having, thinking about press as a sub-audience is sort of usually how I think about them because they, if you can get them your message and you're getting it in a way that then your target audience is reading then you're impacting something more meaningfully. So let's say you're trying to impact and I'm taking this domestic but a Supreme Court justice, very difficult but where do they live? What community newspaper do they read? If you can then target a reporter to put out a message in that paper that's so much more meaningful because that reporter isn't your audience that you're trying to get vote for something or against something. It's that Supreme Court justice but that applies anywhere, here, abroad. Media has a huge impact but they're not gonna make that final jump to make sure that you have success or you're getting the outcome you want. Professor, anything to add too? So how do you know, how do you learn about your audience? Intelligence. I think you need to have intelligence in the field. You have to see who your audience is and you have to use multiple narratives, not just one meta-narrative because there's several different actors. You have to gender the approach. Every, it is according to if it's boys, girls, women or men or even elderly people. And I think if you look at the Islamic State they have effectively done that. They have targeted exactly the different actors and this is something that we need to think of as well. John? Yeah, you gotta start with what success is. So let's talk about ISIS for a sec. So what should our success be? Is success stopping young boys and girls from enlisting? If that is success, then our target audience are young boys and girls who haven't joined yet. It's just as clear as that. Now they may be influenced by parents, by religious figures, by stuff they read in the news media, by peers, there's a lot of ways they can be influenced but you have to figure out who is the decider who has the power to allow you to succeed or not. And success is not about we want to make people more informed about this. That doesn't do any good. You know, we want people to put their arms down. We want people to embrace our peacekeeping mission. That works. We want boys and girls to stop enlisting. We want less legislation to be passed that will endanger our point of view. So we want a determination of where you can really win. Great, thank you. Open it up. Moderate, I've got questions. Oh, I'm getting questions from the audience. Apparently being handed three by five cards. For all. So how do we communicate the truth in a media world that is fast, shallow, and only sort of kind of right? It's a cynical morning here at the US Institute of Peace. How do we communicate the truth in a media world that is fast, shallow, and only sort of kind of right? Let's just work left to right. Professor. I think one of, if you look at the strategy of the media, they are basically looking exactly at what IS is feeding them. IS doesn't have enough journalists on their ground. There's nobody who dares to tread in the new Syriac region. So basically they are the ones who are feeding the media. So they even have control over what we see and what we hear. And this is really dangerous. While we are fixated on the latest beheadings or the latest kidnappings, they're quietly building a state. And I think they are basically feeding us what they want us to know while they're quietly doing their daily work. And this is really dangerous. And I think this is something that we need more investigative reporters. There is a wonderful piece in the Atlantic that was written by someone who actually went to some of these people who are, there are a lot of people who are actually trying to get people to join IS. And they're stuck in their own countries because their countries don't let them leave. So you have spiritual sanctioners in Australia, in the UK, in many different countries. And this wonderful reporter actually, Graham Wood I think, I believe his name is, he actually went to these spiritual sanctioners and interviewed them and asked them, what are you pushing? And what are the pull factors for the youngsters that are leaving? And it was really well done. And I think we need more of that kind of reporting so that we understand the entire picture, not just what you see in the mirror or magazines like that. John, how do we communicate the truth in a media world that's fast, shallow, and only sort of kind of right? Yeah, well, you have to be very clear as to what you're saying. So let's assume we're doing a campaign together. We figured out what success is. We figured out an audience. We've done our public, we've done our research to figure out what motivates that audience. You want a message frame that can be said in about 10 to 15 words. You want to be able to say what you're talking about in a very short, succinct way. And then you repeat it and repeat it and repeat it and repeat it until you're sick of it and then repeat it and repeat it and repeat it again. And you have to find and drive that same message through all channels. So I'll give you that example of my friends, the trial lawyers. They were defined as greedy, evil, selfish and self-centered. We flipped around the message. And by the way, communications is like a good novel. You have a protagonist and you have an antagonist. So instead of the trial lawyers being the antagonists, we made them, we actually took them out of the story. We made the protagonist good people and the antagonist evil corporations. And we called it, we focused on justice. We focused on the system of justice. And our message became a justice message. And we repeated it and repeated it and changed the entire dynamic of the whole debate and changed the whole political dynamic. So you have to be consistent with a message frame that resonates and then find a number of different ways to drive it out. Let me just say one thing about reporters and off to Sarah. We can all, it's really easy to look down on reporters. They are hardworking people. They really try their best. Think about if you have to write every single day something which is gonna have your name on it which now lives forever because the internet, it makes every newspaper, the web, it's permanent. It's a hard thing to do and they're gonna get things wrong but you have to understand what they need. TV reporters need conflict. That's why the Bay headings work so well. That is why they cover crashes or murders because that kind of violence out of the ordinary drives eyeballs. So you have to understand that how they're trying to do their job and you have to figure out a way to frame the message, to give them the message that resonates and gets a story focused in the way you wanna focus it. Sarah? Well John's exactly right. It's, I don't wanna echo, but it's thinking about your audiences and then realizing that people need to receive the same message in different ways. Media should get the same message but it should be curated for them. Actors on the ground should get the same message but it should be in words that they resonate that they understand, that resonates with them. Policy makers should get the same message that you're trying to put out so that you're saying the same thing but you're molding it for each audience. I think that's the most important and the best way to get something out. I think to John's point, there's this notion of an idealized truth and an idealized reporter out there that is shining truth upon us and we should all go, ah, and see the truth. That's sort of nonsense. The issues are multi-dimensional. Most things are about many things at once. So John wasn't lying about trial lawyers. He's saying that trial lawyers are in fact about, some of them are rich guys, you chase them and exploit victims. That's true. It is also about a system of access to justice which is a thing which we also all believe. John didn't try to counter that no, no, no, those lawyers aren't greedy. He said, look, you believe in justice, we believe in justice. Let's talk about how we best pursue justice. It's that angle of it. It's not a change of mind but rather a change of focus. I promise to keep out of these conversations as much as I can. Some of you who know me know that I'm actually being very quite good about it. Can you talk a bit more about the importance of images in strategic communications? It's easy for McDonald's to share an Instagram post of a smiling child eating a Big Mac but how do you communicate complicated policy using pictures? I mean, I'll jump in that. All right. It goes back to what your message is and then how do you convey that message in a visual? So if you wanna talk about hope and reeducation, then use a little kid that's learning in school because that symbolizes, for all of us, the future. Children symbolize the future and hope and positive. It's really what you want to symbolize and you make sure the picture works and drives that way. So it's thinking about how to, that way. Any other thoughts? I was, a couple days ago, I was at the British Academy and there was a wonderful conference there on how terrorists learn and there was a couple that's working at one of the people who were working in a new book on the Cubs of the Caliphate. Mia Bloom is one of the writers and what's interesting is I thought this would be something that we could really leverage because everyone is horrified by the fact that they're now training kids to be terrorists and they're using kids to do horrific things and they're literally taking visuals and pictures of children doing atrocious things and I think that would resonate across the globe. It would be really a great way to leverage the horror that is IS and so I thought this would be some, we need to find trigger points that are effective in our strategic messaging that would resonate across all gender, all nations, all states and I think that's something that we could do that would be very effective. Sarah? I'll just say that don't always go down a checklist and put out everything you think should be out. Maybe sometimes you don't need an image. Be strategic, certain plans will have everything and certain plans will just have two tactics. Be smart, be nimble, don't put out something just to have it out there. That last question was used McDonald's and Big Macs as the point of the question which seems like a good transition if an awkward one to lunch. So please join me in thanking our panelists.