Page 111 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 90

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
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 con-
ceives as desirable states of being and products’ (Leiss et al., 1986, p. 222).

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 has become, 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). 6
These choices are ‘manufactured’, moreover, to contain not merely a ‘use-
value’ (political party A will run the country efficiently) but an exchange or
sign-value (political party A means this, 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 com-
mercial 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.

90