Page 108 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 87

ADVERTISING
controls the encoding of an advertisement, but not its decoding. That said,
a New York Times/CBS poll conducted during the 1988 US presidential
election found that 25 per cent of the voters claimed that political ads had
influenced their choice of candidate (Denton and Woodward, 1990, p. 56).
Notwithstanding the uncertainty inherent in transmitting political
messages through the format of advertising, it has steadily grown as a pro-
portion of campaign resources. In 1988, George Bush and Michael Dukakis
spent between them some $85 million on television advertising (ibid., p. 56).
During the 1992 presidential campaign George Bush’s team spent upwards
of $60 million on television advertising alone. In 1996 the Clinton campaign
spent more than $50 million. In 2004 incumbent George W. Bush and
Democratic challenger John Kerry spent a record $600 million on TV and
radio advertising. In the 2005 British general election campaign, a total of
£42 million was spent by the parties. In 2010, the figure was still higher
though limited by a cap of £18m on each party’s spending. The UK Ministry
of Justice estimated that the 2010 general election cost the parties and their
candidates around £82 million in total. This figure paled in comparison to
the estimated $1 billion spent by US presidential candidates in 2008. In the
US, most of this sum went to paid-for TV spots. By the same token, spending
on the 2010 congressional elections was estimated at around $3.7 billion. 3
Whether advertisements work or not, therefore, no discussion of political
communication would be complete without consideration of them.

POLITICAL ADVERTISING: A DEFINITION

Bolland defines advertising as the ‘paid placement of organisational messages
4
in the media’ (1989, p. 10). 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 broad-
casts (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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