Page 138 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

ADVERTISING

sceptical of their messages, and were prepared to give Labour a
chance. Evidently they were not to be put off by attack ads of the
type almost wholly relied on by the Tories in 1996–7.
For the general election campaign of 2001 the Tories under
William Hague sought to contrast Labour’s record in office with
its electoral commitments of four years earlier. PEBs and posters
designed by advertising agency Yellow M focused on the length of
hospital waiting lists and excessive school class sizes, for example –
promises of success in improving the state of health and education
services having been central to Labour’s 1997 victory. The strategy
failed, however, since all Labour’s campaign managers had to do
was to remind voters that the Tories had not long been evicted from
government after eighteen years in power, and that Tony Blair’s
administration, for all its imperfections, had still achieved enough
since 1997 to warrant a further term in office. Labour’s campaign
ads, designed by the TWBA agency in London, pastiched the
posters used to promote disaster movies, for example, inviting
voters to imagine the consequences of the return to power, after
only four years, of those same Tories who had been so decisively
rejected in 1997 (Figure 6.3). Another poster used digital imaging
to portray William Hague as a clone of Margaret Thatcher, a tactic
deemed sufficient to scare voters off the Tories for another few years.

POLITICAL ADVERTISING IN
THE UNITED KINGDOM: LABOUR

Notwithstanding its recent electoral successes, and in some contrast
to the Conservatives’ unashamedly commercial approach to the
selling of politics, the Labour Party was, for most of the period
under discussion here, resistant to the charms of the professional
advertisers. In the 30 years up to the election campaign of 1987,
only in one of the earliest campaigns – 1959 – did Labour success-
fully use the medium of television as a marketing tool. Ironically
enough, the two figures most associated with this use were
Woodrow Wyatt, who later became a prominent member of the
British Right, and Anthony Wedgwood Benn, better known as
Tony Benn, the left-wing bogeyman of British politics in the 1980s.
Together, these two presented a series of party political broadcasts
which, like the Tories’ 1970 ads discussed earlier, used already
familiar conventions of British television to connote authority to
their audience. In the manner of broadcast current affairs presenters,

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