Page 133 - An Introduction to Political Communication Second Edition

AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL COMMUNICATION

An illustration of the British left’s deep-rooted unease with the
concept of advertising—even if one was advertising a ‘good thing’—
was the launch in 1987 of the left-of-centre Sunday tabloid, News
on Sunday. Following the results of expensive market research
conducted by Research Surveys of Great Britain—at a cost of £1.5
million ‘the most comprehensive research ever carried out for a new
paper’ (Chippindale and Horrie, 1988, p.99)—plans were made to
produce a paper with a potential market (according to the research)
of three million people. A collective was formed to manage the new
paper, and a £1.3 million advertising budget raised from various
sponsors and investors in the labour movement, local government,
and the business community. The advertising agency Barth, Bogle
and Hegarty used this money to design a humorous, irreverent
campaign which exploited such positives as News on Sunday’s lack
of page three girls and its anti-establishment editorial line. As
Chippindale and Horrie put it, ‘the overall brief [as the advertisers
understood it] was quite simple. News on Sunday was to be a popular
newspaper. Therefore the advertising had to get as many people as
possible to sample the product’ (Ibid., p.99).
In doing so, however, B,B&H overstepped the line between sending
up sexism, racism, etc., and seeming to pander to it. This at least was
how the management of News on Sunday saw it. The result, as
Chippindale and Horrie describe it, was a tragic failure of marketing
and promotion, leading ultimately to the closure of the paper and
the loss of several million pounds. In rejecting the professionals’ advice
the management of News on Sunday were following a long tradition
amongst the left which viewed the use of commercial advertising as,
at best, an evil to be reluctantly and grudgingly endorsed only when
absolutely necessary and, at worst, ‘supping with the devil’ of
capitalist propaganda techniques.
Equally illustrative of this attitude was the Labour Party’s
experience with the agency of Wright and Partners in 1983. Having
been convinced that some concessions to professional marketing
were essential if Labour was to compete electorally with the Tories,
the party hired Wright and Partners to run its 1983 campaign.
Having done so, it refused to let agency representatives sit in on
strategy meetings, and party leaders generally kept their distance
from the professional communicators. As Johnson and Elebash put
it, ‘an intolerable client/agency relationship developed’ (1986,
p.302). The 1983 campaign—which ended with the Labour Party’s
lowest popular vote since the 1930s—comprised a series of ads on
the traditional social democratic themes of unemployment, the

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