Page 141 - An Introduction to Political Communication Third Edition

COMMUNICATING POLITICS

conducted by Research Surveys of Great Britain – at a cost of
£1.5 million ‘the most comprehensive research ever carried out for
a new paper’ (Chippindale and Horrie, 1988, p. 99) – plans were
made to produce a paper with a potential market (according to
the research) of three million people. A collective was formed to
manage the new paper, and a £1.3 million advertising budget raised
from various sponsors and investors in the labour movement, local
government and the business community. The advertising agency
Barth, Bogle and Hegarty used this money to design a humorous,
irreverent campaign which exploited such positives as News on
Sunday’s lack of page three girls and its anti-establishment editorial
line. As Chippindale and Horrie put it, ‘the overall brief [as the
advertisers understood it] was quite simple. News on Sunday was to
be a popular newspaper. Therefore the advertising had to get as
many people as possible to sample the product’ (ibid., p. 99).
In doing so, however, Barth, Bogle and Hegarty overstepped the
line between sending up sexism, racism, etc. and seeming to pander
to it. This at least was how the management of News on Sunday
saw it. The result, as Chippindale and Horrie describe it, was a
tragic failure of marketing and promotion, leading ultimately to
the closure of the paper and the loss of several million pounds. In
rejecting the professionals’ advice the management of News on
Sunday were following a long tradition amongst the Left which
viewed the use of commercial advertising as, at best, an evil to
be reluctantly and grudgingly endorsed only when absolutely
necessary and, at worst, ‘supping with the devil’ of capitalist
propaganda techniques.
Equally illustrative of this attitude was the Labour Party’s
experience with the agency of Wright and Partners in 1983. Having
been convinced that some concessions to professional marketing
were essential if Labour was to compete electorally with the Tories,
the party hired Wright and Partners to run its 1983 campaign.
Having done so, it refused to let agency representatives sit in on
strategy meetings, and party leaders generally kept their distance
from the professional communicators. As Johnson and Elebash
put it, ‘an intolerable client/agency relationship developed’ (1986,
p. 302). The 1983 campaign – which ended with the Labour Party’s
lowest popular vote since the 1930s – comprised a series of ads on
the traditional social democratic themes of unemployment, the
National Health Service and homelessness. Aesthetically, they were
unsuccessful, being described by one author as ‘dark, depressing
montages’ (Myers, 1986, p. 122).

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