Page 115 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

(USP) and responsible, among other famous slogans, for the ‘M&Ms
melt in your mouth, not in your hand’ campaign, pioneered the view
that if commercial ‘spots’ could sell products, they could sell
politicians too.
There are, of course, significant ways in which political advertising,
by the nature of what it is selling, differs from commercial advertising.
However, the strategies of association described above are, as Rosser
Reeves suggested that they could be, frequently applied to politicians.
As was noted in Chapter 2 politics has become, for better or worse,
a process in which ‘consumers’ are presented, through the mass media,
with a range of policies from which they must select. As Nimmo and
Felsberg put it, ‘political candidates must frequently offer themselves
as differing brands of the same product’ (1986, p.252). 3
These choices are ‘manufactured’, moreover, to contain not merely
a ‘use-value’ (political party A will run the country efficiently) but
an exchange or sign-value (political party A means this, as opposed
to political party B, which means something else entirely). In the
process of endowing political actors with meaning, advertisers have
deployed all the techniques of their commercial colleagues, while
also producing a few of their own.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF POLITICAL
ADVERTISING: THE UNITED STATES

A history of political advertising should begin with the United States
because it is here that the techniques of the form were pioneered
and where they have reached their highest level of sophistication.
America, having become the twentieth century’s most successful
capitalist power, has gone faster, and further, in cornmodifying the
political process by the use of advertising than any other country.
Moreover, the techniques developed in the United States have been
exported to Britain and other countries, as we shall see in the next
section.
Political advertising is sometimes viewed as a distinctively modern,
not entirely welcome product of the electronic media age. While this
is obviously true for television advertising, the use of media to sell
politicians is by no means a recent phenomenon. Kathleen Jamieson
points out that long before the era of mass electronic media US
political campaigning was still very much about motivating citizens
to exercise their democratic prerogative by voting. By means of
pamphlets, posters, and public events such as parades and rallies,

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