28 November 2008
	ADVERTISING AND POLITICS Twisted message By David Williams Advertising doesn't just influence what you buy. It also helps determine who governs you

Can advertising rule the world? In a society increasingly influenced by perception and "sound-bites", politicians and their parties are turning to advertising agencies to tailor their message and sway voters. There's no doubt advertising can influence the way people vote. Politicians in the US have put advertising through the electronic media to ruthless use for more than half a century. In Britain they have tended to be more fastidious, until recently. In SA, political advertising remains relatively primitive - arguably, a reflection of a landscape where there are few genuine political contests. But with the next general election only months away and the sounds of splintering coming from the ranks of the monolithic African National Congress (ANC), could that change? Primitive or sophisticated, an election tends to concentrate the mind. For the past few years, the ANC's account has been handled by Ogilvy, which was also its main media partner for the 2004 election campaign. The Democratic Alliance (DA) has engaged a rival agency. The DA's Ryan Coetzee says the approach is similar to that of a business. "We look at potential voters, we segment the market, look at which media we need to convey our message." There is a change in the rules this time round. The Independent Communications Authority (Icasa) has determined that political parties should have access to the SABC and other broadcasters in the build-up to the elections, though at the time of writing the conditions had still to be finalised. Access doesn't mean mounting a campaign will be easy. "Marketing a political message has to be one of the most daunting and difficult challenges for an advertising agency," says Gendel Strategic Marketing Group CEO Mike Gendel. "Aside from strategy and tactics, the advertising professional has to deal with delicate nuances of tone and content. Not many copywriters or advertising strategists are trained in this level of sensitivity and specialist skill. Conversely, it is incredible how politicians seem to ignore the fundamentals of matching message and media to the intended target audiences." Gendel, whose agency has done political work in the past, says he senses SA politicians want to play to one another. "We have not yet reached a situation where we have decided on the issues at stake. The appeal tends to be more on an emotional level. They also tend to aim at the wrong audiences - people who are media-literate and well educated." So what can SA political parties learn from the overseas advertising experience? In the US, advertisers and politicians seem to have been adept at making the connections between messages, media and target audience. One of the legendary US political adverts was made for TV in support of Lyndon Johnson's presidential re-election campaign in 1964. His Republican opponent was Barry Goldwater, who had made some careless comments that were interpreted by the Democrats to mean he could not be trusted with nuclear weapons. This was three years after the Cuban missile crisis, the closest the world came during the Cold War to nuclear war. Goldwater had said he'd like to be able to "lob one" - a nuclear warhead - into the men's room of the Kremlin. US media expert professor Kathleen Hall Jamieson explains the comment: "He was talking about the accuracy of our missile system and he didn't, in the context of which that statement was delivered, advocate that we ought to do it. He was asking, in a humorous way, if in fact we had the ability to be that precise." But the Democrats incorporated the comment into an ad and the context was lost. The main Johnson 1964 campaign ad, which came to be known as "Daisy", showed a little girl plucking the petals from a flower, counting up to 10 as she does. As she gets to nine, a clinical male voice counts down from 10 to a missile launch. The girl looks up and the camera zooms in, until the pupil of her eye fills the screen. The countdown reaches zero and the screen is filled with the flash and ensuing mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. This is accompanied by Johnson's voiceover: "These are the stakes! To make a world in which all of God's children can live, or to go into the dark. We must either love each other, or we must die." Another voiceover then adds: "Vote for President Johnson on November 3. The stakes are too high for you to stay home." (To watch the ad, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=63h_v6uf0Ao.) The ad shocked US politicians and voters, but Goldwater was routed in the election. Johnson knew what he was doing. He understood that a controversial ad would be transformed into a news item by the big networks, thus ensuring millions of dollars' worth of free advertising. And Johnson - who stole virtually every election he ever contested, from high school to the US Senate - used every trick he could. The "Daisy" ad was flighted once. That was all it needed. Another master of advertising was President Ronald Reagan, who recreated on TV the intimate tone established on radio in the 1930s by President Franklin D Roosevelt. Reagan's 1984 re-election campaign used a TV ad that combined facts with optimism, and capitalised on what Reagan had achieved in relation to the legacy of his predecessor, Jimmy Carter. The opening line added a new phrase to the common language. "It's morning again in America," the ad began. "Today more men and women will go to work than ever before in our country's history. With interest rates at about half the record highs of 1980, nearly 2 000 families today will buy new homes, more than at any time in the past four years... "It's morning again in America, and under the leadership of President Reagan, our country is prouder and stronger and better. Why would we ever want to return to where we were less than four short years ago?" The ad was applauded by politicians and the ad industry, and it is believed to have played a major part in his re-election. Advertising has had a role in all US elections since World War 2. In the 2004 presidential campaign between the incumbent George W Bush and John Kerry, the candidates had together spent US$400m by September, with the heavy electioneering still to come. In 2008 Barack Obama, John McCain, Hillary Clinton and others have been no less extravagant. Britain took a lot longer to accept political advertising, partly because commercial TV was established later than in the US. Until the 1980s, virtually the only TV access for politicians was through "talking head" broadcasts. Margaret Thatcher broke the mould after she became leader of the Conservative Party. She engaged the British agency Saatchi & Saatchi - an important patriotic statement at a time when most British ad agencies were subsidiaries of US parents. In the run-up to the 1979 general election, with Jim Callaghan's government in disarray after a strike-plagued "winter of discontent", Saatchi came up with the line "Labour isn't working". Thatcher won the election and the Saatchi brothers got a lot of the credit. Recently the Labour Party hired Saatchi & Saatchi to handle its advertising campaign for the next election. It's a different firm nearly 30 years on - the founding brothers left in 1994 and founded a new agency - and is part of the Publicis group. It has come up with a line to build the image of embattled premier Gordon Brown. Understated in tone, the visual shows him looking rather untidy in a creased suit, with the line: "Not flash, just Gordon." Saatchi CEO Robert Senior says the campaign is "using creativity to shine a light on the truth of the party and the individual, something that hasn't always been done in recent British political advertising." Which is presumably another way of saying that Labour needs to get away from the spin of the Blair years. In SA, political advertising has tended to play it safe, and there has been a reluctance among party funders to shell out for what appears to be a luxury when the result is often a foregone conclusion. In 1970 the old United Party ran full-page newspaper ads showing a candle burned down very low, with the line: "It's time for a change." The reference was to a National Party government that had been in office for 22 years. The Nats were returned with a slightly reduced but still very large majority. There was no TV in SA then, no independent radio and no electronic political advertising. Things haven't changed much. Spending is relatively tiny. Between 2004 and 2006, the ANC spent R46m and the DA R16m. In the election year of 2004, the respective totals were R27m and R9m. Should SA politicians try to emulate the aggressive, no-holds-barred US style? Jamieson points out that "a lot of attack is perfectly legitimate and important discourse". She argued in a TV interview: "If you don't have attack in politics, you're not likely to find out about the weaknesses of the opponent. The opponent isn't likely to indicate what those are on his own." Gendel notes that: "In strong democracies, political advertising which attacks a political opponent can be very negative and even brutal. Of course, it would be naive to think that political advertising, when the campaigns assault the SA public in 2009, will be entirely ethical, truthful or polite. Expect lots of attack ads and negative campaigns." In the end, which is more credible for voters - political advertising, or politics as covered by competing "independent" media? Again, Jamieson's view is instructive: "If I had a choice between watching what you typically see in news about campaigns, or watching typical ads, I would watch the ads. And I'd watch them back-to-back, so I'd watch both candidates advertising, because in the give-and-take of advertising, you're likely to get more policy content than you are in the typical newscast."