Page 122 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 101

ADVERTISING
government of Harold Macmillan in obviously staged ‘spontaneous dis-
cussion’ about the successes of their term in office. Like the ‘Eisenhower
Answers America’ spots, these were pioneering but essentially flawed adver-
tisements, the understandable product of unfamiliarity with a new medium.
In Michael Cockerell’s view, the first ‘television election’ was that of 1955,
when the Tories hired Roland Gillard as their media adviser, ushering in a
period of professionalism in their political advertising which the Labour
Party completely failed to match (1988). The 1955 campaign included a
powerful broadcast starring Harold Macmillan articulating Britain’s
continuing role as a force for peace and progress in the world. In 1959 the
Conservatives became the first British party to hire a commercial advertising
company to run its campaign. Colman, Prentice and Varley were paid
£250,000 for a campaign which directly targeted the young, affluent,
working-class electorate on whom the Tories then depended for the retention
of political power. For the first time, argues Cockerell, advertising was used
‘to promote the Party and its leaders like a commercial product’ (ibid., p. 66).
The Conservatives won the 1959 election, but lost the 1964 campaign,
despite the best efforts of Colman, Prentice and Varley, against the
background of a party deeply divided and demoralised by the Profumo affair
and other scandals. In 1969, as another election loomed, the agency of
Davidson, Pearce, Barry, and Tuck Inc., introduced target marketing for the
Tories, and the subsequent general election of 1970 witnessed the most
media-conscious campaign ever in Britain. As Cockerell puts it, ‘the Tories
attempted to use the techniques and idioms of television with which viewers
were most familiar. They . . . employed all the most sophisticated modern
means of persuasion and marketing that the advertising industry had
devised . . . [as a result] the Tories succeeded in increasing the marginal
propensity to buy among the voters’ (ibid., p. 169) and won the election.
One advertisement used the visual and narrative style associated with ITV’s
popular and authoritative News at Ten programme. Another played with the
conventions of commercial advertising, depicting a housewife ‘fed up’ with
the old brand – Labour – and willing to try the new, Conservative, product.
Despite its successful use of political advertising in 1970 the Conservative
government led by Edward Heath became publicly associated with severe
economic and industrial problems, such as the miners’ strike and the three-
day week, leading to its defeat in the general election of 1974. In 1976 Heath
was replaced as leader by Margaret Thatcher, who continued the Tories’
pioneering approach to political advertising with the appointment of Saatchi
and Saatchi to run the 1979 election campaign.
By 1983 the Conservatives had employed a full-time Director of
Marketing, Chris Lawson, who worked with Saatchi and Saatchi to design
a campaign which relied to a greater extent than ever before on US-style
value research and ‘psychographics’ of the kind described above in con-
nection with Ronald Reagan’s campaigns. Johnson and Elebash note that

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