Hence the ‘popularity’ of the ISIS murders, although it is not only video that is being used to market the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.ĭabiq, the slickly designed magazine online magazine used by ISIS for propaganda and recruitment, has a huge following and is highly influential in terms of promoting ‘strategic’ messages. Likewise, war, and the atrocities committed as an act of it, is something of a must-see event, no matter what people’s views about its justice.
Marketing certainly affects the presentation of war, and video, whether on television or social media, cannot but turn war into a spectacle and a story. Flames of War is not only a recruitment tool it’s also a way for ISIS to establish a narrative about itself, now matter how aborehent. It chronicles actual battles with ISIS’s enemies-the film culminates in the capture of a Syrian military base near the city of Ar Raqqah-with all the attendant blood and gore. The camerawork is solid, the soundtrack rousing. It’s action packed and entertaining, complete with heroes, villains, and a linear plot. The ISIS film, Flames of War, runs just under an hour. Lately, viral marketing has been the preferred method, particularly video, but the US military was producing made to order propaganda videos, long before ISIS started to publish beheadings on social media – think of the Hollywood-esque rescue of the young, nineteen years old, attractive blonde Private Jessica Lynch from the evil clutches of the enemy during the Iraq war in 2003. Government defence departments have been recruiting PR people to sell the policy of war and control the language of war since PR began.
Similarly, like all large businesses, military organisations, need a public relations strategy to set the media agenda. If victory is the single most important product manufactured by military, then is has to be sold to citizens as taxpayers and consumers, and also as potential recruits. But why wouldn’t it? Are you really surprised that ISIS are good at digital media or that online communications is an integral creative cog of organised bloodshed? Marketing war is nothing new, but the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), the Sunni militant group that seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom, is re-writing the war marketing rule book by deploying a sophisticated social-media strategy, which seems to be working.
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