Page 130 - An Introduction to Political Communication Fifth Edition

Intro to Politics Communication (5th edn)-p.qxp 9/2/11 10:55 Page 109

ADVERTISING
presentation in politics [i.e. the use of professional advertising], for very
serious reasons: the welfare of human beings, the care of people and the fact
that we want to overcome unemployment. These are the real tasks before us,
not presenting people as if they were breakfast food or baked beans’ (quoted
in Myers, 1986, p. 122).
An illustration of the British Left’s deep-rooted unease with the concept
of advertising – even if one was advertising a ‘good thing’ – was the launch
in 1987 of the left-of-centre Sunday tabloid, News on Sunday. Following the
results of expensive market research conducted by Research Surveys of Great
Britain – at a cost of £1.5 million ‘the most comprehensive research ever
carried out for a new paper’ (Chippindale and Horrie, 1988, p. 99) – plans
were made to produce a paper with a potential market (according to the
research) of three million people. A collective was formed to manage the new
paper, and a £1.3 million advertising budget raised from various sponsors
and investors in the Labour movement, local government and the business
community. The advertising agency Barth, Bogle and Hegarty used this
money to design a humorous, irreverent campaign which exploited such
positives as News on Sunday’s lack of page three girls and its anti-
establishment editorial line. As Chippindale and Horrie put it, ‘the overall
brief [as the advertisers understood it] was quite simple. News on Sunday
was to be a popular newspaper. Therefore the advertising had to get as many
people as possible to sample the product’ (ibid., p. 99).
In doing so, however, Barth, Bogle and Hegarty overstepped the line
between sending up sexism, racism, etc. and seeming to pander to it. This
at least was how the management of News on Sunday saw it. The result,
as Chippindale and Horrie describe it, was a tragic failure of market-
ing and promotion, leading ultimately to the closure of the paper and the
loss of several million pounds. In rejecting the professionals’ advice the
management of News on Sunday were following a long tradition amongst
the Left which viewed the use of commercial advertising as, at best, an
evil to be reluctantly and grudgingly endorsed only when absolutely
necessary and, at worst, ‘supping with the devil’ of capitalist propaganda
techniques.
Equally illustrative of this attitude was the Labour Party’s experience
with the agency of Wright and Partners in 1983. Having been convinced
that some concessions to professional marketing were essential if Labour
was to compete electorally with the Tories, the party hired Wright and
Partners to run its 1983 campaign. Having done so, it refused to let agency
representatives sit in on strategy meetings, and party leaders generally kept
their distance from the professional communicators. As Johnson and
Elebash put it, ‘an intolerable client/agency relationship developed’ (1986,
p. 302). The 1983 campaign – which ended with the Labour Party’s lowest
popular vote since the 1930s – comprised a series of ads on the traditional
social democratic themes of unemployment, the National Health Service

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