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Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 100

COMMUNICATING POLITICS
with the help of sophisticated political marketing, shrewdly positioned
himself between left and right, adopting a strategy of ‘triangulation’
(1997). This meant, as already noted, taking the most popular themes
and policies from the Democrats on the one hand (a strong welfare pro-
gramme, for example), and the Republicans on the other (strong on law
and order, welfare to work).

POLITICAL ADVERTISING IN THE UNITED
KINGDOM

Political advertising, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, was pioneered
in the US and has reached its highest level of sophistication there. But the
techniques, styles and formats described above have been exported to other
liberal democracies in which the media play an equally central cultural role.
In the UK, as already noted, paid political advertising on television is
prohibited (though not advertising in the press, the cinema or on billboards).
The 2003 Communications Act also prohibits advertising on TV and radio
by any non-party political organisations, defined as any group whose main
aim is ‘to influence public opinion on a matter of controversy’. This includes
trade unions, campaigning organisations such as Amnesty, and animal rights
organisations. Despite the onset of new technologies, and challenges to the
prohibition under Article Ten of the European Convention on Human
Rights, it remains in force.
Legislation notwithstanding, ‘party political broadcasts’ can easily be
viewed as advertising, given that, in them, ‘the source controls the message’
(Johnson and Elebash, 1986, p. 303) and that, increasingly, professional
advertising and marketing agencies are employed by the parties to make them.
As was the case in America, British political advertising predates broad-
casting, with parties utilising print and other media to disseminate campaign
messages from the nineteenth century. As in the US, it emerged as a major
element of the political process only with the spread of television as a mass
medium in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, professional advertising and
marketing techniques were first adopted in Britain by the party of capitalism,
the Conservatives. For reasons which we shall examine later (see pp. 108–
14), the Labour Party, though initially enthusiastic about the use of television
as a political marketing tool, spent most of the period between the mid-
1950s and the mid-1980s resisting the appeal of professional image-makers,
a factor which may well have contributed to their gradual decline as a party
during this period.
The Tories, on the other hand, began to employ television advertising as
early as 1955, having noted the success of Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign and
the role of advertising in it. Early Conservative broadcasts were, according
to the typology introduced in the previous section, ‘primitive’, depicting the

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