Page 132 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

pp. 117–26), the Labour Party, though initially enthusiastic about
the use of television as a political marketing tool, spent most
of the period between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s resisting
the appeal of professional image-makers, a factor which may well
have contributed to their gradual decline as a party during this
period.
The Tories, on the other hand, began to employ television adver-
tising as early as 1955, having noted the success of Eisenhower’s
1952 campaign and the role of advertising in it. Early Conservative
broadcasts were, according to the typology introduced in the
previous section, ‘primitive’, depicting the government of Harold
Macmillan in obviously staged ‘spontaneous discussion’ about
the successes of their term in office. Like the ‘Eisenhower Answers
America’ spots, these were pioneering but essentially 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

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