Page 126 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

ADVER TISING

flawed advertisements, the understandable product of unfamiliarity
with a new medium.
In Michael Cockerell’s view, the first ‘television election’ was
that of 1955, when the Tories hired Roland Gillard as their media
adviser, ushering in a period of professionalism in their political
advertising which the Labour Party completely failed to match
(1988). The 1955 campaign included a powerful broadcast starring
Harold Macmillan articulating Britain’s continuing role as a force
for peace and progress in the world. In 1959 the Conservatives
became the first British party to hire a commercial advertising
company to run its campaign. Colman, Prentice and Varley were
paid £250,000 for a campaign which directly targeted the young,
affluent, working-class electorate on whom the Tories then depended
for the retention of political power. For the first time, argues
Cockerell, advertising was used ‘to promote the Party and its leaders
like a commercial product’ (Ibid., p.66).
The Conservatives won the 1959 election, but lost the 1964
campaign, despite the best efforts of Colman, Prentice and Varley,
against the background of a party deeply divided and demoralised
by the Profumo affair and other scandals. In 1969, as another election
loomed, the agency of Davidson, Pearce, Barry, and Tuck, Inc.,
introduced target marketing for the Tories, and the subsequent general
election of 1970 witnessed the most media-conscious campaign ever
in Britain. As Cockerell puts it, ‘the Tories attempted to use the
techniques and idioms of television with which viewers were most
familiar. They…employed all the most sophisticated modern means
of persuasion and marketing that the advertising industry had
devised… [as a result] the Tories succeeded in increasing the marginal
propensity to buy among the voters’ (Ibid., p.169) and won the
election. One advertisement used the visual and narrative style
associated with ITV’s popular and authoritative News at Ten
programme. Another played with the conventions of commercial
advertising, depicting a housewife ‘fed up’ with the old brand—
Labour—and willing to try the new, Conservative, product.
Despite its successful use of political advertising in 1970 the
Conservative government led by Edward Heath became publicly
associated with severe economic and industrial problems, such as
the miners’ strike and the three-day week, leading to its defeat in the
general election of 1974. In 1976 Heath was replaced as leader by
Margaret Thatcher, who continued the Tories’ pioneering approach
to political advertising with the appointment of Saatchi and Saatchi
to run the 1979 election campaign.

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