Page 112 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 91

ADVERTISING
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 advertise-
ments, 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 pro-
position’. This was based around the idea of ‘spontaneity’, in the sense that
Eisenhower’s television campaign would focus on his ability to be sponta-
neous 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.

91