Page 125 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

POLITICAL ADVERTISING IN THE UNITED
KINGDOM
Political advertising, as noted at the beginning of this chapter, was
pioneered in the United States, and has reached its highest level of
sophistication there. But the techniques, styles, and formats described
above have been exported to other liberal democracies in which the
media play an equally central cultural role. In Britain, as already
noted, paid political advertising on television is prohibited (though
not advertising in the press, the cinema, or on billboards). As the
Independent Television Commission’s Code of Practice puts it, ‘no
commercial made by a body of a political nature is allowed, or an ad
directed at a political end, or one related to an industrial dispute, or
one which shows partiality in political or industrial controversy, or
which relates to current public policy’.
But ‘party political broadcasts’ can easily be viewed as
advertising, given that, in them, ‘the source controls the message’
(Johnson and Elebash, 1986, p.303) and that, increasingly,
professional advertising and marketing agencies are employed by
the parties to make them.
As was the case in America, British political advertising predates
broadcasting, with parties utilising print and other media to
disseminate campaign messages from the nineteenth century. As
in the USA, it emerged as a major element of the political process
only with the spread of television as a mass medium in the 1950s.
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, professional advertising and marketing
techniques were first adopted in Britain by the party of capitalism,
the Conservatives. For reasons which we shall examine later (see
pp. 114–21 ), the Labour Party, though initially enthusiastic about
the use of television as a political marketing tool, spent most of
the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s resisting
the appeal of professional image-makers, a factor which may well
have contributed to their gradual decline as a party during this
period.
The Tories, on the other hand, began to employ television
advertising as early as 1955, having noted the success of
Eisenhower’s 1952 campaign and the role of advertising in it. Early
Conservative broadcasts were, according to the typology introduced
in the previous section, ‘primitive’, depicting the government of
Harold Macmillan in obviously staged ‘spontaneous discussion’
about the successes of their term in office. Like the ‘Eisenhower
Answers America’ spots, these were pioneering but essentially

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