Page 122 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

Political advertising is sometimes viewed as a distinctively
modern, not entirely welcome product of the electronic media age.
While this is obviously true for television advertising, the use of
media to sell politicians is by no means a recent phenomenon.
Kathleen Jamieson points out that long before the era of mass
electronic media, US political campaigning was still very much
about motivating citizens to exercise their democratic prerogative
by voting. By means of pamphlets, posters and public events such as
parades and rallies, nineteenth-century Americans were persuaded
to support particular candidates and reject others. Candidates
and parties wrote campaign songs, which functioned like modern
ads, summarising policy themes and promises. As Jamieson
notes:

those who pine for presidential campaigns as they were
in Jefferson, Jackson, or Lincoln’s times and who see
our nation’s political decline and fall mirrored in the rise
of political spot advertising remember a halcyon past
that never was. The transparencies, bandanas, banners,
songs and cartoons that pervaded nineteenth century
campaigning telegraphed conclusions, not evidence. . . .
Their messages were briefer . . . than those of any
sixty second spot ad. The air then was filled not with
substantive disputes but with simplification, sloganeering
and slander.
(1986, p. 12)

If such features of political campaigning preceded the electronic
age, however, they were invested with a qualitatively different
significance by the invention of radio and TV. Political advertising
ceased to be a form of interpersonal communication experienced
simultaneously by a few hundreds or thousands of people at most,
and became mass communication about politics, with audiences of
many millions.
By the early 1950s, as already noted, television had become a
truly mass medium in the US, supported financially by advertising
revenue. In the 1952 presidential campaign General Eisenhower
became the first candidate to employ a professional advertising
company to design television advertisements, on which $1 million
were eventually spent. The agency of Batten, Barton, Dustine, and
Osbourne was selected to design the campaign, while Rosser Reeves
assisted in formulating Eisenhower’s ‘unique selling proposition’.

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