Page 114 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

ADVER TISING

‘proving’ the effectiveness of the product as against others in the
market. The high cultural status of the scientist, and the scientific
procedure which he (it is, usually, a ‘he’) demonstrates, legitimises
the product.
Another frequently used meaning system is that of nostalgia. In
the classic British example of this technique—the 1985 advertisement
2
for Hovis bread —the product was placed in a mythical past where
‘natural’, ‘wholesome’ techniques of manufacturing bread were used,
and in which people were honest and hard-working. These
attributes—‘naturalness’, ‘wholesomeness’, ‘honesty’—were implied
by the structure of the ad to be in the bread. Such a strategy could
only work in a culture which values nostalgia, and associates it with
the attributes mentioned. In Britain in the 1980s, such a culture was
clearly thought to exist by the advertiser concerned.
Advertisements may be constructed so as to associate their product-
signifiers with well-known icons from the wider culture. Perfumes,
for example, are often ‘sold’ by associating them with former models
and film stars. Each ‘star’-signifier has a distinctive meaning for the
audience (Vanessa Paradis is not Elizabeth Taylor, who is different
from Kate Moss, who is not Catherine Deneuve, etc.). The perfume
manufacturer aspires to borrow this meaning, and thus give the
product an analogous distinctiveness. This strategy is perhaps the
most commonly used, in the advertising of everything from training
shoes to banking services (Pirelli’s Sharon Stone ad, and Michelin’s
use of the Velvet Underground song ‘Femme Fatale’ reveal the
subtleties of selling tyres in modern capitalism), and may be applied
not just to human icons, but also to famous movies (such as Close
Encounters of the Third Kind and Star Wars), songs, paintings, and
other signifiers with broad cultural resonance. In this manner
‘advertising affects a “transfer of value” through communicative
connections between what a culture conceives as desirable states of
being and products’ (Leiss et al., 1986, p.222).

ADVERTISING AND POLITICS

The perceived success of advertising in post-war consumer capitalism
(made possible by the advent of mass television) led directly to the
hypothesis that such strategies of persuasion could be applied to the
political process. By the 1950s there were in the United States some
19 million television sets. Advertising executive Rosser Reeves,
inventor of the marketing concept of the ‘Unique Selling Proposition’

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