Page 112 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

ADVER TISING

countries, however, paid political advertising on television and
radio is restricted by law. In Britain, while paid advertising can be
bought in newspapers, cinemas, and billboards, parties are
prohibited from buying broadcast airtime. Instead, they are
allocated free airtime in which to transmit party political broadcasts
(PPBs) and party election broadcasts (PEBs). The allocation of
airtime is based on the number of candidates which a party stands
at a general election.
While PPBs and PEBs (and their equivalents in other countries)
are not ‘paid for’ advertisements in the American sense, they are
produced by companies like Saatchi using the same techniques and
with the same budgets as commercial advertisers. For our purposes,
therefore, PPBs are included alongside American ‘spots’ in this
chapter’s discussion of political advertising, both forms having in
common the fact that the politicians (or the creative staff to whom
they delegate the work) have complete artistic and editorial control
over them.

HOW ADVERTISEMENTS WORK

Advertising, as was noted above, has two functions in the process of
exchange between a producer (of goods, services, or political
programmes) and the consumer. Firstly, it informs. The political
process, as we observed in Chapter 1, is supposed to involve rational
choices by voters, which must be based on information. Journalism
represents one important source of such information, advertising
another. So, just as early product advertisements were little more
than simple messages about the availability of a brand, its price and
function (use), so contemporary political advertising can be seen as
an important means of informing citizens about who is standing,
and what they are offering the citizenry in policy terms.
But advertising, as already noted, also seeks to persuade. In the
1950s, writing of the role of advertising in American consumer
capitalism, Pierre Martineau observed that

in our competitive system, few products are able to
maintain any technical superiority for long. They must
be invested with overtones to individualise them; they
must be endowed with richness of association and
imagery; they must have many levels of meanings, if
we expect them to be top sellers, if we hope that they

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