Page 116 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

ADVER TISING

nineteenth-century Americans were persuaded to support particular
candidates and reject others. Candidates and parties wrote campaign
songs, which functioned like modern ads, summarising policy themes
and promises. As Jamieson notes:

those who pine for presidential campaigns as they were
in Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln’s times and who see our
nation’s political decline and fall mirrored in the rise of
political spot advertising remember a halcyon past that
never was. The transparencies, bandanas, banners, songs
and cartoons that pervaded nineteenth century
campaigning telegraphed conclusions, not evidence…
Their messages were briefer…than those of any sixty
second spot ad. The air then was filled not with
substantive disputes but with simplification, sloganeering
and slander.
(1986, p.12)

If such features of political campaigning preceded the electronic
age, however, they were invested with a qualitatively different
significance by the invention of radio and TV. Political advertising
ceased to be a form of interpersonal communication experienced
simultaneously by a few hundreds or thousands of people at most,
and became mass communication about politics, with audiences of
many millions.
By the early 1950s, as already noted, television had become a
truly mass medium in the United States, supported financially by
advertising revenue. In the 1952 presidential campaign General
Eisenhower became the first candidate to employ a professional
advertising company to design television advertisements, on which
$1 million were eventually spent. The agency of Batten, Barton,
Dustine, and Osbourne was selected to design the campaign, while
Rosser Reeves assisted in formulating Eisenhower’s ‘unique selling
proposition’. This was based around the idea of ‘spontaneity’, in the
sense that Eisenhower’s television campaign would focus on his ability
to be spontaneous when meeting citizens, answering their questions
and presenting his policies with ease and accessibility.
This was indeed a ‘unique selling proposition’ in the context of
the times, and in some contrast to the approach of his opponent,
Adlai Stevenson, who conveyed an impression of serious bookishness
which, as with British Labour leader Michael Foot some thirty years
later, was perhaps better suited to the pre-television age.

99