Page 123 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

ever since, as has the production (or concept) ad, designed to convey
important ideas about candidates’ (Ibid., p.27). Concept ads avoid
overly personalising a campaign (Jamieson, 1986), seeking instead
to project ‘the big idea’ about a candidate. The Reagan ‘concept’,
for example, was frequently expressed in terms of ‘getting government
off the backs of the people’, or ‘being tough with the commies’. George
Bush’s was ‘experience’ and ‘reliability’, while Bill Clinton’s successful
1992 concept was ‘a time for change’—the need for it, and the
suggestion that he embodied it.
Cinéma-vérité spots are those which depict the candidates in ‘real
life settings interacting with people’ (Devlin, 1986, p.29). We referred
above to the tactic often used by incumbents of using archive news
footage to show a candidate being ‘presidential’, ‘governorial’, etc.
The cinéma-vérité technique may also be used in more informal
settings such as meet-the-people walkabouts, or in depicting scenes
from a candidate’s home or work life (one of Jimmy Carter’s 1976
spots showed him at work on his Georgia peanut farm).
It goes without saying that such footage will often be scripted and
rehearsed, even if the intention is to give the impression of spontaneity
and informality.
Devlin also identifies two forms of what Jamieson calls ‘personal
witness’ ads (1986), in which the views of non-candidates are
enlisted for the purposes of endorsement. Those interviewed may
be the man-in-the-street [sic], using vox pop techniques to
demonstrate the ‘ordinary voters’ support for a candidate. More
commonly, personal witness ads are testimonials, in which the
endorsing is done by famous and respected personalities from the
worlds of politics, entertainment, the arts and sport. This is the
political advertisers’ variant of the association strategy used by
commercial advertisers described above. In testimonials, the
authority and status of the witness is (the advertiser hopes)
transferred to the candidate/ product.
To this list Jamieson adds the neutral reporter format, in which
the viewer is presented with a series of apparently factual statements
about a candidate (or the opponent) and then invited to make a
judgment. While ‘neutrality’ is obviously absent from such an
advertisement (the tactic is used frequently in the most cynically
negative of spots) the speaker adopts the narrative conventions which
signify neutrality and objectivity to impart the message. The intended
impression is one of neutrality.
From the professional perspective of the advertiser, each of these
types of ad will present different problems and objectives. Sometimes

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