Page 121 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

ADVERTISING AND POLITICS

The perceived success of advertising in post-war consumer
capitalism (made possible by the advent of mass television) led
directly to the hypothesis that such strategies of persuasion could be
applied to the political process. By the 1950s in the US there were
some 19 million television sets. Advertising executive Rosser
Reeves, inventor of the marketing concept of ‘Unique Selling
Proposition’ (USP) and responsible, among other famous slogans,
for the ‘M&Ms melt in your mouth, not in your hand’ campaign,
pioneered the view that if commercial ‘spots’ could sell products,
they could sell politicians too.
There are, of course, significant ways in which political adver-
tising, by the nature of what it is selling, differs from commercial
advertising. However, the strategies of association described above
are, as Rosser Reeves suggested that they could be, frequently
applied to politicians. As was noted in Chapter 2 politics has
become, for better or worse, a process in which ‘consumers’ are
presented, through the mass media, with a range of politics from
which they must select. As Nimmo and Felsberg put it, ‘political
candidates must frequently offer themselves as differing brands of
the same product’ (1986, p. 252). 3
These choices are ‘manufactured’, moreover, to contain not merely
a ‘use-value’ (political party A will run the country efficiently) but
an exchange or sign-value (political party A means this, as opposed
to political party B, which means something else entirely). In the
process of endowing political actors with meaning, advertisers have
deployed all the techniques of their commercial colleagues, while
also producing a few of their own.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF POLITICAL
ADVERTISING: THE UNITED STATES

A history of political advertising should begin with the US because
it is here that the techniques of the form were pioneered and where
they have reached their highest level of sophistication. The US,
having become the twentieth century’s most successful capitalist
power, has gone faster, and further, in commodifying the political
process by the use of advertising than any other country. Moreover,
the techniques developed in the US have been exported to Britain
and other countries, as we shall see in the next section.

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