Dollarocracy (21 page)

Ogilvy & Mather's creative head, Robert Spero, shared his boss's stance toward political ads. When told that TV political advertising sold politicians like soap, he responded that unfortunately that was not the case, because soap advertising was markedly superior as a source of useful information. Spero was so appalled by political advertising that he took leave from his position
at Oglivy & Mather in the late 1970s to do a comprehensive analysis of every available presidential television political commercial from 1952 through the 1976 election. In Spero's mind, the key distinction between commercial ads and political ads was that political advertising, unlike commercial advertising, had First Amendment protection from regulation for fraud and misleading content. This point is indeed crucial and cannot be exaggerated: political advertising can pretty much say whatever it wants without fear of regulatory reprisal.

Spero's subsequent book,
The Duping of the American Voter
, demonstrated in a meticulous and engaging case-by-case study that political ads for all varieties of presidential candidates routinely had fraudulent traits that would have been impossible for a commercial advertiser facing the Federal Trade Commission and other forms of government regulation at that time. “Corporations and their advertising advisers have not become simon-pure in their evolvement from street hucksters. Historically, bending the truth has been inseparable from selling,” Spero wrote. “What has prevented the truth from being bent out of all proportion by corporations and their advertising agents is the phenomenal growth of advertising regulation over the past decade.”
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(It is worth noting that the 1970s was the high-water mark for regulation of commercial advertising.)

Industry dissidents remain, such as creative whiz Claudia Caplan, who in
Advertising Age
dismissed political advertising as “hectoring, polemical dreck” and argued that it was smart business for ad agencies to avoid it altogether.
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And then there is Burt Manning, the former chairman of the American Association of Advertising Agencies and chairman emeritus of J. Walter Thompson (JWT). Channeling Ogilvy, Manning warned on the eve of the 2012 election that “I relate the decline in Americans' trust and acceptance of general advertising to their violent dislike of mudslinging political advertising. It's more of a problem now, because there is more of it.”
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This sentiment is countered by the emergence of the money-and-media election complex, which means Madison Avenue still gets a piece of the action—even if much of the political ad business goes to consultants and their specialized agencies—so there is incentive to accept the status quo and go with the flow.
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After all, can political advertising really be that much worse than junk food, insurance, oil company, pharmaceutical, alcohol, or tobacco advertising? Bob
Jeffrey, who has followed Manning as CEO of JWT Worldwide, noted that election cycles “for the advertising business, these are very profitable seasons.”
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What is clear is that any change of heart from Madison Avenue had little or nothing to do with the integrity or quality of the political ads themselves. Jeffrey was beside himself describing their imbecility.
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A study in the early 2000s of political spots cited by reputable sources found “roughly half of all ads to be unfair, misleading or deceptive.”
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Preliminary examinations of 2012's political ads suggest that percentage has only grown, perhaps a great deal.

In fact, Ogilvy and Spero were too quick to regard political advertising and product advertising as being distant relations, though their approach has been widely internalized among scholars. Political scientists and political communication scholars generally understand political advertising first and foremost as an outgrowth of political campaigning—understandably, as that is the tradition scholars come from—and they pay particular attention to identifying the common themes that link the present to earlier eras. And because blarney, bluster, deception, character assassination, showmanship, manipulation, idiocy, baby-kissing, superficiality, overstatement, ridicule, hypocrisy, and hyperbole have always been present to varying degrees in popular politics, the argument goes, Americans should not be so alarmed that these traits now come packaged as candidate TV ads. Because in the past the American democratic system always ended up working effectively, and voters were able to cut through the crap and use the system to adequately convey their core political values and concerns, there is little reason to think that will not remain the case in the era of political advertising. The system works; the more things change, the more they stay the same.

This approach underplays or misses the decisive differences in the current nature of political campaigns wrought by TV political advertising. There is the matter of the enormous increase in funds necessary to successfully participate as a candidate and the strings that come attached to these funds. There is also the matter of the power, sophistication, and ubiquity of televised political advertising; it now replaces virtually everything else in the campaign, including all the forces that in theory could counteract the power of money and advertising. There is also the matter that people—to a significant extent and for rational reasons—detest political advertising in a manner that has no apparent precedent in American political campaigns.

In our view, our current political campaigns can be more accurately appreciated by understanding political advertising as a subset of commercial advertising. This approach has received too little attention from scholars, probably because so few of them have given much consideration to the matter, or seem to know much about it. Modern commercial advertising is not a function of what economists term “competitive markets,” meaning new businesses can easily enter existing profitable markets, increase output, lower prices, and make the consumer live happily ever after. Such markets tend to have relatively little advertising, if only because producers can sell all that they produce at the market price, over which they have little or no control. (Think of a wheat farmer in 1875.) This is why the largely local and competitive U.S. economy prior to the late nineteenth century had little advertising by the standards of the past one hundred years.

Modern persuasion advertising blossomed as a function of markets that were less competitive by economists' standards. Generally described as oligopolies, these markets are characterized by a handful of firms dominating output or sales in the industry and having sufficient market power to set the price at which their product sells. The key to an oligopoly is that it is very difficult for newcomers to enter the market, no matter how profitable it may be, because of the power of the existing players. Under oligopoly, there is strong disincentive to engage in price warfare to expand market share, because all the main players are large enough to survive a price war and all it would do is shrink the size of the industry revenue pie that the firms are fighting over. Indeed, the price in an oligopolistic industry will tend to gravitate toward what it would be in a pure monopoly, so the contenders are fighting for slices of the largest possible revenue pie.
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At first blush, this is a pretty accurate picture of the U.S. economy of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Under Dollarocracy, the economy has become far more monopolistic over the past thirty years.
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It is also a good way, though by no means the only way, to understand the emergence and dominance of advertising. Although firms are not in competitive markets, they are most definitely competing with each other to maximize their profits. Advertising emerges front and center as a major way to increase market share (and protect market share) without engaging in destructive profit-damaging price competition.

The election realm is similar to the economy in that it tends to be a duopoly in general elections, meaning there are usually only two options that could conceivably win, and, as in an oligopoly, they have used their “market power”—in this case control over election laws—to make it all but impossible for a third party to successfully establish itself as a legitimate contender. Nice work if you can get it. Even primary elections are almost always a matter of no more than two or three viable entrants except in a very small number of races.

The great political theorist C. B. Macpherson was among the first to understand modern electoral politics—the two-party system—in terms of oligopolistic and duopolistic market practices. “Where there are so few sellers,” Macpherson wrote concerning political parties, “they need not and do not respond to buyers' demands as they must do in a fully competitive system.” This means the parties, like oligopolistic firms, can “create the demand for political goods” and largely dictate the “demand schedule for political goods.”

In Macpherson's argument, a duopolistic party system in a modern capitalist society like the United States will tend to gravitate to providing a “competition between elites,” who are the driving force and “formulate the issues.”
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The basics in the political economy are agreed upon by the two parties and are off the table for public debate or discussion. In Macpherson's view, the two-party system produces citizen apathy and depoliticization—especially among those at the bottom end of the economic spectrum—and maintains elite rule, or what would be called a “weak democracy.” For supporting evidence, political scientist V. O. Key's trailblazing research in the 1950s demonstrated the class bias in voting turnout—rich people often voted at nearly twice the rate of poor people—in the first half of the twentieth century.
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Macpherson provided these insights in the 1970s, before Dollarocracy and before political advertising nudged the Richter scale in political science. If anything, the linkage of the two parties to elite economic interests is stronger today than it was in his era. But the economic analogy is good only for a broad brushstroke, because elections are not commercial marketplaces and duopolistic elections existed a very long time before the emergence of political advertising. For political advertising to emerge as a major factor required a number of developments, first and foremost the establishment of commercial television broadcasting. Those nations with limited or seriously regulated
commercial broadcasting have less political advertising and little political pressure to encourage it.

Where the oligopoly/persuasive advertising analogy is crucial to understanding political advertising—indeed the money-and-media election complex—is when we look at the
content
of the ads. Under conditions of oligopoly, firms tend to produce similar products and sell them at similar prices. Therefore, advertising that emphasizes price and product information can be ineffectual, if not counterproductive. (That type of price and product information advertising can be found in more competitive retail markets or in classified advertising.) An ad campaign based on “Hey, buy our soft drink because it costs the same and tastes the same as our competitor” probably won't lead to awards, a promotion, or a long career. Firms put inordinate effort into creating brands that are perceived as different from competitors, and advertising is crucial in creating the aura surrounding these brands.

Perhaps it is not entirely coincidental that Rosser Reeves, the pioneer of modern TV political advertising, is also generally considered one of the great visionaries of product advertising. He was reputed to have repeated the same presentation for years for newly hired copywriters at his Ted Bates advertising agency in the 1960s. He would hold up two identical shiny silver dollars, one in each hand, and would tell his audience in effect, “Never forget that your job is very simple. It is to make people think the silver dollar in my left hand is much more desirable than the silver dollar in my right hand.”
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Reeves advocated packaging as new and unique what was actually old and ordinary in a given product. Reeves specialized in making claims for his products that were not always true, but they were not entirely untrue either. His specialty was “the uncheckable claim.”
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It was an ideal approach to selling products in oligopolistic markets. “Since most brands are basically not that different,” William Greider wrote, “advertising's fantasies provide as good a reason as any to choose one brand over another.”
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There is an endless search by advertisers for ways to capture attention and differentiate products that exploit possibilities that may have little or nothing to do with the actual product and the utility it might render to the consumer. This search also leads to ads that attempt to make a product virtue out of something that is insignificant or not specific to the product or irrelevant.

Television advertising, in particular, made it possible to develop this aspect far beyond what Reeves only began to imagine. It uses cultural cues to communicate
fairly complex messages in less than thirty seconds, exploiting stereotypes and cultural references to pack a lot of meaning into a few fleeting seconds. It is expert at playing on emotions. TV advertising uses visuals in such a way that anyone only reading the text or listening to the words will miss the heart of what is being communicated.
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In short, television advertising is the highest grade and most sophisticated system of applied propaganda in the world.

“All advertisers know this,” former advertising executive Jerry Mander wrote. “They know that even the dumbest products and ideas can gain acceptance because advertising imagery does not appeal to intellect but exploits a human, genetic, sensory predisposition to believe what we see. That's the way premodern humans protected themselves. In that sense, we are all still premodern.”
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On television, Mander noted, “even auto ads, which we would expect to have something concrete to say, are far more focused on glamorous curves, or speed, or good-looking people.”
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