• by September 11, 2003

As intelligence agencies try to determine whether he was live or Memorex, the numbers suggest Sept. 11 terrorist-in-chief Osama bin Laden may be more of a fading memory. As far as VNR (video news release) campaigns go, the creepy video reappearance of bin Laden on the eve of the Sept. 11 attacks was, by Madison Avenue standards, a flop. Sure Al Jazerra's initial broadcast of the Al-Qaeda leader's video sent international financial markets tumbling overnight, but it doesn't take much these days to spook Asian investors and by the early morning of Sept. 11, European markets were already tracking upward. By mid-morning, Eastern Time, Wall Street indexes were up modestly. But let's face it, bin Laden's propaganda machine isn't aimed so much at our pocketbooks as much as it is at our psyches. But if you apply the same measures used by Madison Avenue to gauge the success of most marketing communications campaigns - media impressions - bin Laden's reach into our innermost psyches has faded, not grown, two years after the attacks. Wednesday's world media coverage of bin Laden drew less than half the number of stories it did on Sept. 10, 2002, the eve of the first anniversary of the attacks, according to a MediaPost analysis of press coverage compiled by the Lexis/Nexis news database. Interestingly, the falloff has been greater for overseas media outlets - the ones that presumably are more targeted at bin Laden's actual constituency - than the U.S. press. While coverage of bin Laden declined 47% among U.S. newspapers and wire services, it fell 61% among non-U.S. news outlets. Perhaps most significant of all, bin Laden's coverage in the category Nexis defines as "Major World Publications" fell 73% from Sept. 10, 2002.

"Osama bin Laden"

                          2002   2003   Change 
Major World Publications   161     43     -73% 
U.S. Papers/Wires          252
133     -47% 
Non-U.S. Papers/Wires      285    110     -61% 
All News Sources           697    321     -54% 

Source: A Riff analysis of press coverage compiled by the Lexis/Nexis news database for Sept. 10 of each year.