Page 109 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 88

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
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 rational choices 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 who is 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 signify meanings 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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