Collide Magazine

Phil Cooke on Branding Faith

Scott McClellan - Originally posted Monday, March 31, 2008

Author, consultant, and producer Phil Cooke has a lot to say about churches and media.  And why wouldn’t he after decades of working at the intersection of the two? At times, Cooke may appear to be Christian media’s biggest critic but, as he is quick to point out, he criticizes because he loves. That love prevents Cooke from abandoning the church world, and instead moves him to call Christians to a higher standard of production. His new book, Branding Faith, issues such a calling. Cooke wrote the book as an argument/field manual for effective communication in a 21st-century context.  

COLLIDE: Let’s talk about the new book, Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Nonprofits Impact Culture and Others Don't. What was your motivation for this project?

Phil Cooke: Thirty years of working with churches and ministries that just don’t get it when it comes to media. The concept of branding is really very simple. A lot of people think branding is about crass commercialism, big business, and exploiting workers in Third World countries. A lot of people have really negative connotations of branding, but the essential definition of branding is simply the story that surrounds a product, a person, or an organization. In other words, what do people think of when they think of you? What do people think of when they think of Apple? What do they think of when they think of Nike? All that information is encoded in that brand. A brand is a story that surrounds an organization.

So my thing is the Church actually began branding because we’re the people who began thousands of years ago telling a compelling story about the faith that transformed our lives. But it seems in the last 40 or 50 years, we’ve lost that ability and business now does it better than we do. Nike tells a better story than most pastors.

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COLLIDE: In an overwhelmingly cluttered and competitive media marketplace, I guess it’s your position that churches can compete, that churches can expect to have their voice heard.

Cooke: Absolutely, yeah. In fact, in the book I don’t just deal with Joel Olsteen who has a 30,000-member church in Houston. I’m not talking just about the big boys. I think if you have a 50-person church there are ways to have your voice heard out there through the Internet and through print. People need to know that you exist. There are a lot of little techniques in the book that can help the smallest church meeting at the end of a strip mall at the shopping center get their story told more effectively. I think it is definitely possible to get noticed out there.

COLLIDE: That’s good news for a lot of churches. As I was thinking about your book, I remembered a line in Velvet Elvis where Rob Bell says that the words “church” and “marketing” in the same sentence make him sick.  Obviously you have a different take on that.

Cooke: I totally understand what Rob’s saying, and I’ve heard that before. I think what Rob really means is hearing the words “church” and “bad marketing” in the same sentence make him sick. But marketing is simply sharing your story with the world. Good marketing is doing it with integrity, doing it with style, and doing it with taste. Trust me, Rob Bell is a brilliant marketer. He markets all the time. He markets his NOOMA film series. He markets Mars Hill Bible Church. He markets his books. So to say he detests marketing is not really what he means. He means bad marketing, cheesy marketing.

We joke around our office that our company is about creating Christian television that doesn’t suck, and it’s really true because so many Christians do it so badly. So most pastors have a real negative connotation with marketing.

We need to understand as Christians how our perception matters. In a media-driven culture, perception is just as important as reality. It doesn’t matter if you’re an anointed man of God if people think you’re a no -talent hack, because that’s what you are.

COLLIDE: Why do you think that churches or Christians in general create bad media?

Cooke: I’ll tell you: The first Christian leaders in the media world were not producers like me. They were not writers. They were not directors. They were not actors. They were preachers.

When the radio first opened up in the ‘30s and ‘40s and then television opened up in the ‘40s and ‘50s, it was not producers and creatives who seized on that opportunity. It was preachers because they looked at it and thought, “Hey, here’s a great way to extend my message.” And I applaud them for it. I’m thrilled. But I’m embarrassed that creative producers didn’t exist at that time or didn’t step up to the plate and take advantage of the opportunity. But preachers did.

Now, the problem with that is for a preacher, the answer to every problem is a good sermon. You know, a hammer sees everything as a nail. A preacher sees everything as a good sermon. They basically took what they did on Sunday morning to radio and television.

Marshall McLuhan, the great communication theorist, said, “The medium is the message.” Preachers had this idea that, as long as the message doesn’t change, whatever method they used didn’t matter: “I can preach my message at church. I can preach on the radio.” But what Marshall McLuhan proved is the method does matter.

You go to a live church service and you hear the music, you see the pastor’s sweat. You feel the electricity of three, four, five hundred people or more in the congregation. That’s an entirely different experience from listening to that sermon on the radio when you’re all by yourself in your car or watching it on television when you’re eating breakfast or getting dressed. It’s a completely different experience.

All I’m calling for is to move from the age of television preachers to the age of television producers. And I want the power and influence to start coming from behind the camera. I think we need to step up and raise the bar and create compelling documentaries, music programs, drama, and comedy. So those are the kinds of things we really feel called to do because I think that’s going to impact the culture in a much more compelling way. Does that make sense?

COLLIDE: Yeah, I like that. In your opinion, do you think that media’s influence on our culture has grown in the last several years or is it just taking different forms?

Cooke: No, no, no. When you get up in the morning, your clock radio goes off and you’re listening to the radio. Then you turn on the TV and watch the morning news or you pick up the newspaper and read it. Then you get in your car and you turn on a podcast or turn on the radio or pop in a CD. Then you get to work and you surf the web all day on your computer. Then you come home and watch the evening news. Then you turn on a couple sitcoms or watch a few prime-time shows, maybe go to a movie. Then you come home and watch the evening news before you go to bed. We are being inundated by the media 24-7.

The media has changed the political process. It’s changed the education system in America. It’s changed entertainment. I got gas the other day and I pulled up to the station and lo and behold there’s a TV monitor in my gas pump. So I’m watching television while I’m pumping my gas.

COLLIDE: Wow. You just mentioned a bunch of things media has changed such as our political process and education; it’s also changed what the average church service looks like on a given Sunday.

Cooke: You’re exactly right, it has totally changed worship. I was reminded the other day when we filmed this William Wilberforce documentary. We were in London, and I was reminded that sermons at that time would go for a couple of hours. It was not unusual at all for a Sunday sermon to go for a couple of hours.

Television—the sound byte world—has totally impacted the way we worship. And maybe this is a postmodern viewpoint, but we’re kind of beyond whether it’s good or bad. We’re at the point where we have to deal with this thing. Too many ministries raise money and complain about Hollywood or about television. Well, you know what? It’s there. Let’s deal. Let’s learn to quit complaining about it and learn to deal with it.

Why do we boycott and criticize Hollywood so much? We don’t do that to a tribe in a Third World country. When a missionary goes overseas, they don’t go up to a tribe in Africa or Asia or South America and stand outside the tribe holding signs and criticizing the tribe. Do we really expect that by calling gays names on national TV that’s going to change their behavior? Do we really expect Hollywood to change their approach to movies because we criticize them all the time? I mean missionaries just don’t do that.

What do they do? They develop a sense of trust with the tribe. They get to know them. They get to understand them. And once they develop that sense of trust, then they’re able to speak into that tribe’s life. Well, so why don’t we do that to Hollywood?

For more information about Branding Faith, visit www.brandingfaith.com. To find out more about Phil, visit www.philcooke.com.