Rehabilitating Brand America was the theme of an expansive, multi-presenter session at Advertising Week New York on Wednesday, including a panel of PR and reputation leaders. Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB opened with recent data from the Pew Research Center that shows US favorability around the world has dropped from 64% to 48%, and un-favorability has grown from 26% to 39%. [...] Trump is perhaps more the symptom than the disease, according to the panel of PR leaders. 

The good news, however, is that propaganda is back. I don’t mean the unfragrant mob of internet miscreants — hacking is to propaganda what stalking is to romance. I mean the impulse to choose a side and press its case with wily elegance. Those of us who grew up in the Cold War have rather missed it — the persistent, well-designed, all-encompassing salesmanship of Life’s Correct Path, backed up with textbooks, posters and unspeakable stockpiles of nuclear weapons.

Budweiser has released an ad that will air during this Sunday's 2017 Super Bowl that nods to the heated debate over immigration. The television commercial shows the dramatized journey of a German man that results in the creation of the Anheuser-Busch InBev (ABI) company that owns the Budweiser beer brand.

No country is further from Madison Ave than Soviet-style North Korea, but advertising is beginning to emerge as makers of goods try to pitch products to a rising group of consumers and a wealthy class of citizens.