Page 126 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

hard-working, God-fearing pioneers. The advertisement tapped
into what the campaign’s researchers had established was a deep
longing amongst many Americans for a past and a country like the
one depicted in the film. The ‘American dream’, or myth, was then
attached to the concept of the Reagan presidency.
The same strategy was applied by the Reagan campaign team
to foreign policy. In one spot a deep, soothing voice warned viewers
that ‘there’s a bear in the woods’. Here, the Reagan campaign was
manipulating the fear of communism and the ‘Russian bear’.
Demonising the Soviets was of course a central feature of Reagan’s
presidency, and this ad sought to identify him with the defence
against it. Although the name of Reagan’s opponent in 1984,
Walter Mondale, was not mentioned in the ad, the film attempted
to secure the audience’s assent to the notion that another Reagan
term was the best defence America had against communism.
To manipulate mythology and deep-rooted cultural values in
this way implies a degree of sophistication in the market research
carried out by campaigners. Ronald Reagan’s electoral success has
been ascribed in large part to the market research efforts of key
media advisers like Dick Wirthlin and Roger Ailes, who successfully
identified the motivations and values underlying the voting
behaviour of key sectors of the American electorate. As former
Conservative media adviser Brendan Bruce puts it, Wirthlin’s value
research for the Reagan campaigns ‘represents the most important
advance in political communication of the last two decades. It
provides the image makers with the best possible guide to the
effective presentation of policy, by creating a clear understanding of
how voters make their choice of party. It also supplied them with a
rich and subtle vocabulary of persuasive language and motivating
symbols’ (1992, p. 87). As we shall shortly see, such techniques are
now also applied to the British campaigning process.

Signifying power
Before leaving the subject of values, emotions and symbolism, we
should note the importance in political advertising of symbols of
power and status, and the advantages which these give to an
incumbent candidate or party. A candidate in office, such as Nixon
in 1972 and Reagan in 1984, inevitably acquires a stock of
experience and credibility which can be represented in advertise-
ments by the use of archive footage of press conferences, foreign
tours, meetings with international leaders, and so on. These visuals,

105