POLITICAL ADVERTISING: A DEFINITION

POLITICAL ADVERTISING: A DEFINITION
Bolland defines advertising as the ‘paid placement of organisational messages
in the media’ (1989, p. 10).
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Political advertising therefore, in the strict sense,
refers to the purchase and use of advertising space, paid for at commercial
rates, in order to transmit political messages to a mass audience. The media
used for this purpose may include cinema, billboards, the press, radio,
television and the internet.
In the US, television ads are known as ‘spots’, and their cost in the world’s
richest media market largely accounts for the extraordinary expense of US
political campaigning. In some countries, however, paid political advertising
on television and radio is restricted by law. In Britain, while paid advertising
can be bought in newspapers, cinemas and billboards, parties are prohibited
from buying broadcast airtime. Instead, they are allocated free airtime in
which to transmit party political broadcasts (PPBs) and party election broadcasts (PEBs). The allocation of airtime is based on the number of candidates
which a party stands at a general election.
While PPBs and PEBs (and their equivalents in other countries) are not
‘paid for’ advertisements in the American sense, they are produced using the
same techniques and with the same budgets as commercial advertisers. For
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our purposes, therefore, PPBs are included alongside American ‘spots’ in this
chapter’s discussion of political advertising, both forms having in common
the fact that the politicians (or the creative staff to whom they delegate the
work) have complete artistic and editorial control over them.
HOW ADVERTISEMENTS WORK
Advertising, as was noted above, has two functions in the process of
exchange between a producer (of goods, services, or political programmes)
and the consumer. First, it informs. The political process, as we observed in
Chapter 1, is supposed to involve rationalchoices by voters, which must be
based on information. Journalism represents one important source of such
information, advertising another. So, just as early product advertisements
were little more than simple messages about the availability of a brand, its
price and function (use), so contemporary political advertising can be seen
as an important means of informing citizens about whois standing and what
they are offering the citizenry in policy terms.
But advertising, as already noted, also seeks to persuade. In the 1950s,
writing of the role of advertising in American consumer capitalism, Pierre
Martineau observed that
in our competitive system, few products are able to maintain any
technical superiority for long. They must be invested with overtones
to individualise them; they must be endowed with richness of
association and imagery; they must have many levels of meanings, if
we expect them to be top sellers, if we hope that they will achieve the
emotional attachment which shows up as brand loyalty.
(1957, p. 50)
In a marketplace where there are twenty brands of soap powder, all
performing essentially the same function (or thirty automobiles, or fifty types
of margarine), each brand must take on a unique identity in the minds of
the consumer. To use the language of Marx: the manufacturer creates a
commodity by endowing raw materials with ‘use-value’ (or utility). The
advertiser gives it ‘exchange-value’, which will be based partly on utility, but
also on its meaning as a distinctive entity in a status-conscious world.
Baudrillard writes of products having ‘sign-value’, in so far as they ‘are at
once use-value and exchange-value. The social hierarchies, the invidious
differences, the privileges of caste and culture which they support, are
encountered as profit, as personal satisfaction, as lived as “need”’ (1988, p.
59). Commodities come to signifymeanings other than those of their utility.
A Porsche is more than a vehicle for transporting people from one point to
another. Levi 501s are more than hard-wearing work garments. Flora
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margarine is more than an oily spread. And in so far as commodities take on
these meanings, advertising is the most important means available to
producers for bringing them to the market.
Advertisements function, therefore, by making commodities mean
something to their prospective purchasers; by distinguishing one product
from another, functionally similar one; and by doing this in a manner which
connects with the desires of the consumer. As Leiss et al.put it, ‘in advertising, the creators of messages try to turn signifiers [commodities] with
which audiences may have little or no familiarity, into meaningful signs that,
they hope, will prompt consumers to respond with appropriate behaviour’
(1986, p. 153).
A variety of strategies are available to advertisers in pursuing this goal.
All have in common that they import familiar(to the audience) meanings
and signifiers from outside the narrow world of the product itself, and load
them on. The products being advertised appropriate meanings from other
signifiers existing in the culture (Williamson (1978) calls them ‘meaning
systems’). For example, the advertising of soap powder is frequently
organised around the meaning system of ‘science’. In advanced capitalist
societies, ‘science’ carries with it many positive connotations – objectivity,
authority, reliability, ‘modernness’, and so on. Thus, in a soap powder ad we
frequently find a white-coated ‘scientist’ ‘proving’ the effectiveness of the
product as against others in the market. The high cultural status of the
scientist, and the scientific procedure which he (it is, usually, a ‘he’) demonstrates, legitimises the product.
Another frequently used meaning system is that of nostalgia. In the
classic British example of this technique – the 1985 advertisement for Hovis
bread
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– the product was placed in a mythical past where ‘natural’, ‘wholesome’ techniques of manufacturing bread were used, and in which people
were honest and hard-working. These attributes – ‘naturalness’, ‘wholesomeness’, ‘honesty’ – were implied by the structure of the ad to be in the
bread. Such a strategy could only work in a culture which values nostalgia
and associates it with the attributes mentioned. In Britain in the 1980s, such
a culture was clearly thought to exist by the advertiser concerned.
Advertisements may be constructed so as to associate their product-signifiers with well-known icons from the wider culture. Perfumes, for example,
are often ‘sold’ by associating them with former models and film stars. Each
‘star’-signifier has a distinctive meaning for the audience (Beyonce is not
Elizabeth Taylor, who is different from Kate Moss, who is not Nicole
Kidman, etc.). The perfume manufacturer aspires to borrow this meaning
and thus give the product an analogous distinctiveness. This strategy is
perhaps the most commonly used, in the advertising of everything from
training shoes to banking services (Pirelli’s Sharon Stone ad, and Michelin’s
use of the Velvet Underground song ‘Femme Fatale’ reveal the subtleties of
selling tyres in modern capitalism), and may be applied not just to human
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icons but also to famous movies, songs, paintings and other signifiers with
broad cultural resonance. In this manner ‘advertising effects a “transfer of
value” through communicative connections between what a culture conceives as desirable states of being and products’ (Leiss et al., 1986, p. 222).