ADVERTISING AND POLITICSAs dramatis

ADVERTISING AND POLITICS
As dramatised in the successful US TV show Mad Men, the perceived success
of advertising in post-war consumer capitalism (made possible by the advent
of mass television) led directly to the hypothesis that such strategies of
persuasion could be applied to the political process. By the 1950s in the US
there were some 19 million television sets. Advertising executive Rosser
Reeves, inventor of the marketing concept of ‘Unique Selling Proposition’
(USP) and responsible, among other famous slogans, for the ‘M&Ms melt in
your mouth, not in your hand’ campaign, pioneered the view that if
commercial ‘spots’ could sell products, they could sell politicians too.
There are, of course, significant ways in which political advertising, by the
nature of what it is selling, differs from commercial advertising. However,
the strategies of association described above are, as Rosser Reeves suggested
that they could be, frequently applied to politicians. As was noted in Chapter
2 politics hasbecome, for better or worse, a process in which ‘consumers’
are presented, through the mass media, with a range of politics from which
they must select. As Nimmo and Felsberg put it, ‘political candidates must
frequently offer themselves as differing brands of the same product’ (1986,
p. 252).
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These choices are ‘manufactured’, moreover, to contain not merely a ‘usevalue’ (political party A will run the country efficiently) but an exchange or
sign-value (political party A meansthis, as opposed to political party B, which
means something else entirely). In the process of endowing political actors
with meaning, advertisers have deployed all the techniques of their commercial colleagues, while also producing a few of their own.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF POLITICAL ADVERTISING:
THE UNITED STATES
A history of political advertising should begin with the US because it is here
that the techniques of the form were pioneered and where they have reached
their highest level of sophistication. The US, having become the twentieth
century’s most successful capitalist power, went faster, and further, in
commodifying the political process by the use of advertising than any other
country. Moreover, the techniques developed in the US were exported to
Britain and other countries.
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Political advertising is sometimes viewed as a distinctively modern, not
entirely welcome product of the electronic media age. The use of media to
sell politicians is, however, by no means a recent phenomenon. Kathleen
Jamieson points out that long before the era of mass electronic media, US
political campaigning was still very much about motivating citizens to
exercise their democratic prerogative by voting. By means of pamphlets,
posters and public events such as parades and rallies, nineteenth-century
Americans were persuaded to support particular candidates and reject
others. Candidates and parties wrote campaign songs, which functioned like
modern ads, summarising policy themes and promises. As Jamieson notes:
those who pine for presidential campaigns as they were in Jefferson,
Jackson, or Lincoln’s times and who see our nation’s political decline
and fall mirrored in the rise of political spot advertising remember
a halcyon past that never was. The transparencies, bandanas,
banners, songs and cartoons that pervaded nineteenth century
campaigning telegraphed conclusions, not evidence. . . . Their
messages were briefer . . . than those of any sixty second spot ad.
The air then was filled not with substantive disputes but with
simplification, sloganeering and slander.
(1986, p. 12)
If such features of political campaigning preceded the electronic age,
however, they were invested with a qualitatively different significance by the
invention of radio and TV. Political advertising ceased to be a form of
interpersonal communication experienced simultaneously by a few hundreds
or thousands of people at most, and became mass communication about
politics, with audiences of many millions.
By the early 1950s, as already noted, television had become a truly mass
medium in the US, supported financially by advertising revenue. In the 1952
presidential campaign General Eisenhower became the first candidate to
employ a professional advertising company to design television advertisements, on which $1 million were eventually spent. The agency of Batten,
Barton, Dustine, and Osbourne was selected to design the campaign, while
Rosser Reeves assisted in formulating Eisenhower’s ‘unique selling proposition’. This was based around the idea of ‘spontaneity’, in the sense that
Eisenhower’s television campaign would focus on his ability to be spontaneous when meeting citizens, answering their questions and presenting his
policies with ease and accessibility.
This was indeed a ‘unique selling proposition’ in the context of the time,
and in some contrast to the approach of his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, who
conveyed an impression of serious bookishness which, as with British
Labour leader Michael Foot some thirty years later, was perhaps better suited
to the pre-television age.
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Eisenhower’s spontaneity was articulated in a series of ‘Eisenhower
Answers America’ spots, showing him answering questions from the American
public. The setting up of the questions and answers was far from being
spontaneous, of course, and to a 1990s audience the results look stilted and
clumsy. Eisenhower, nevertheless, won the election, reinforcing a growing
belief in political advertising’s effectiveness as a campaigning instrument.
The ‘Eisenhower Answers America’ spots were primitive, but nevertheless
established political advertising as an essential element of any self-respecting
candidate’s armoury. From the 1952 campaign onwards, ‘spot’ political
advertising increased in sophistication and production values, acquiring
what Diamond and Bates describe as ‘distinctive rhetorical modes and visual
styles’ (1992, p. x), with several trends clearly apparent.
The shrinking spot
First, US political ads have tended to become shorter in duration. Although
the Eisenhower spots were relatively brief (around 30 seconds), the 1956
campaign saw the introduction of five-minute advertisements, sandwiched
between popular entertainment programmes in an effort to benefit from the
latter’s large audience share. Candidates also bought airtime in 30-minute
chunks, which were then used to elaborate at length on their policy positions. Research found, however, that audiences quickly grew bored with
advertisements of such length, and switched off (literally or figuratively). In
response, political advertisers moved towards shorter spots after 1956. With
some exceptions (such as Ross Perot’s 1992 presidential campaign) the
preference of campaign organisers ever since has been for 30- or 60-second
spots. This format is clearly not one in which campaign issues and candidates’ policies can be discussed at any length, giving rise to the aforementioned criticism of advertising’s negative impact on the political process.
The formof the 30/60-second spots, it is argued, determines a content which
is inevitably grounded in image rather than substantive issues.
The rise of image
The second general trend in US political advertising, then, is towards greater
emphasis on the construction of the candidate’s image (or the destruction of
an opponent’s), and away from the communication of an issue or policy
position. Richard Joslyn observes that of 506 ‘spots’ shown on American
television between 1960 and 1984, only 15 per cent contained information
about specific policies, while 57 per cent addressed the personal and professional qualities of the candidate – his or her ‘image’ (1986).
In 1992, successful candidate Bill Clinton’s image was constructed around
notions of youth, vigour and radicalism, contrasting vividly (as it was surely
meant to) with the advanced age and conservatism of his opponent George
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Bush. Ronald Reagan’s image was that of a ‘nice guy’ – handsome and
congenial, while firm and unbending against the enemies of freedom. Jimmy
Carter’s image, which helped him to be elected in 1976, was of a self-made
small businessman (peanut farmer), independent of the Washington establishment which had produced the corruption of Richard Nixon and the complacency of Gerald Ford. The campaign which led to Barack Obama’s election
as president in 2008 stressed an image of the candidate as youthful, inspirational and not of the Washington establishment. His ethnicity and his roots
in Chicago black politics were the basis for an image-based campaign of
‘Hope’ and ‘Change’ (Figure 6.1)