Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (9 page)

Through the Harvard club of Buffalo, O’Malley won a scholarship to the Ivy League university in Cambridge, where he got a degree in English literature. When he returned to Canada, he thought he had his whole future mapped out: he was going to teach at Ridley College in his hometown of St. Catharines. He even had the requisite corduroy jacket with the elbow patches, as well as the pipe.

But a tag-along trip to a girlfriend’s interview changed his life. While she was applying for a job at the Kodak Company on Richmond Street in Toronto, O’Malley wandered into the MacLaren advertising firm next door and, without much of a sales pitch, landed a $50-a-week job for himself as a copywriter. Just twenty-four years old, he was immediately swept into the mad mad world of 1960s advertising, where his bosses downed bottles of rye before noon, a blue cigarette haze permanently hung in the air and every firm had its own in-house bar for round-the-clock socializing.

O’Malley was neither a heavy drinker nor a smoker. A big pail of candy sat on the desk in O’Malley’s office, and visitors were invited to graze freely. He loved sports, especially hockey and baseball. He was also shy, preferring to express himself at his Underwood typewriter rather than in public speaking. He would show up for meetings with a bundle of sharpened pencils and notepaper, scribbling and free-associating slogans while the clients stated their needs. When it came time to hammering out the slogans at the typewriter, O’Malley would always come up with them in multiples of five, and number twenty-seven would always be called the “Frank Mahovlich” one.

For his first few years in advertising, O’Malley moved around from agency to agency. But in 1964, he landed at Vickers and Benson, where he stayed for the rest of his career, dreaming up some of the ads that are emblazoned into Canadian marketing memory. Some of his favourites were the ones he did for the Dairy Bureau of Canada, casting butter as a sensuous indulgence (“Just Butter It”) and cheese as a friendly meal staple (“Show your cheddar more warmth; take it out of the fridge more often”). In the political realm, O’Malley penned the slogan “a leader must be a leader” and helped cast Trudeau to the public in the famous gunslinger pose that became one of his iconic images. The big difference between writing ads for products and writing ads for politicians, O’Malley found, was the speed and urgency around the political campaigns. They had a “finish line” and a score. The ad campaigns O’Malley wrote for products and the private sector, meanwhile, could afford to take a more leisurely route into the public psyche.

Like many creative folks, O’Malley found it hard to describe how he came up with so many marketing home runs, but he did subject his ideas to what he called the “Teddy and Eddie test”—always imagining how his old St. Catharines buddies, Ted and Ed, would respond to the ads he was creating. The trick in advertising, as politicos were learning, was to reach the people who didn’t care about what you were selling. Keith Davey believed that O’Malley was unquestionably the most talented ad man in Canada. The two men had met at Harry Rosen’s while Davey was being fitted for one of his trademark pinstriped suits, and quickly struck up a bosom-buddy friendship, fuelled by their mutual love of baseball.

O’Malley was the creative brain behind the Carling Red Cap beer campaign in the mid-1960s, which helped seal the position of Vickers and Benson as one of the pre-eminent ad firms in Canada. The beer had been suffering a market decline, and O’Malley came up with the idea to turn the remaining loyal patrons into populist heroes, a nation unto themselves. In essence, the man who had been helping politicians behave more like brands was infusing a brand with a political identity. Red Cap drinkers, O’Malley decided, would be a collective society of their own with a leader, an anthem and a salute.

As O’Malley described it, “It was as though it had a life of its own. The first spot would be the launch, and would be the initial gathering of Red Cap drinkers, a speech from the president, the singing of the anthem, and the concluding salute: an extended right arm, thumb up, with the left hand over the heart… We took about half the office staff down to Maple Leaf Stadium and, through… camera trickery, made the stadium appear full. Nick Nichols, whom we had made the president, spoke from the pitcher’s mound in rousing political style.”

The ads were an immediate hit—university students sang the song and did the salute at football games, while newspapers and magazines did long features on the ad campaign. Vickers and Benson started work on a second campaign, featuring real people and their participation in the Red Cap Nation—shades of the Tim Hortons “True Stories” ads that would come three decades later. Red Cap Nation also blazed a trail for beer-and-patriotism ads that would prove popular later in the twentieth century.

The nation-gripping Canada–Russia hockey series in 1972 was also a Vickers and Benson production. The firm came up with the name “Team Canada” and even designed the Canadian team’s jerseys with their bold red-and-white maple leaf. Again, they were ahead of themselves. Later in the decade, hockey would also become interlaced with politics and patriotism—part of a larger fusion between democracy, commercial brands and sports.

Vickers and Benson also won the advertising account for McDonald’s Restaurants in Canada—a task that included hiring people to play the clown-like mascot, Ronald McDonald. One day, as O’Malley was passing by the receptionist’s area of the office, he looked over at people coming and going near the elevators. Keith Davey was stepping off one elevator, while one of the Ronald McDonald actors, in full costume, was getting on another, on his way to an assignment. To O’Malley, this brief visual said everything about Vickers and Benson. “I said to myself, ‘That’s us!’” O’Malley recalled. Could there be any more vivid picture of this ad firm’s place at the nexus of consumer and political culture in Canada?

Yet even as the politicos and the TV-commercial characters were passing each other in the corridors of the ad firms, they were still inhabiting different worlds. Political ads were getting slicker, image-wise, but they retained a certain earnest optimism about Canadians’ interest in matters of state. The goal of the advertising, for the most part, was to provoke citizens into civic-mindedness. The idea was to make citizens like their politics, and their politicians, a little better. Still, the 1974 campaign would mark a turning point for the Liberals—when Trudeau and the party stepped into a modern campaign heavily steeped in TV, emotion and slick marketing methods.

Gone were the earnest efforts of the 1972 campaign to engage the intellectual Trudeau in a “conversation” with Canadians; Trudeau would be more removed from the fray—an image more than a personality, in what was dubbed a “peek-a-boo” campaign. “The leader’s campaign was a cunning, neo-traditional mixture of old-fashioned optics with modern media management,” Stephen Clarkson wrote in his book
The Big Red Machine
. “Instead of creating a campaign themselves, the ad men simply highlighted the effort being made by the leader on his tour.” The Liberals took out a full-page ad in Saturday newspapers across the country, with the headline “Issues Change from Year to Year. The Ability to Lead Does Not.” The entire appeal was focused on strength, leadership and stability in uncertain times—under an elusive, distant leader. (Canadians with more recent memories might find strong parallels to the Stephen Harper campaign of 2011, also focused on turning a shaky minority into a “strong, stable majority government.”)

Under Grafstein’s direction in the 1974 campaign, the Red Leaf consortium came up with advertising intended to endear Canadians to Trudeau and have them vote with their emotions, much in the same way that advertisers wanted to capture their clientele. The free-time film commercials, overseen by Jerry Goodis of MacLaren, depicted a “loving” and “beautiful” Trudeau. Goodis himself called the ads “straight propaganda, featuring ordinary Canadians in fedoras and glasses, ethnics, country people, kids—films full of uglies and one beautiful guy.”

The bigger, larger fight of the 1974 election, though, was about very consumerist concerns—wage and price controls. The Conservatives, under leader Robert Stanfield, were insisting that controls were necessary in these times of rampant inflation and rampaging gas prices. The annual inflation rate was ballooning over 10 percent and food prices had been rising even more rapidly. The Liberals were arguing that wage and price controls weren’t necessary; Trudeau famously mocked the Tories with his “Zap, you’re frozen” line on the campaign trail.

In radio ads, Liberals argued that wage and price controls were a failed experiment, internationally. “The United States tried wage and price controls and ended up with spiralling costs and a huge bureaucracy,” said one of the ads, drafted by Vickers and Benson and read by Trudeau over the airwaves to Canadian consumer-citizens. “The UK tried them and faced rioting labour unions. As a slogan, wage and price freeze may sound good but it just does not work. What is needed is a mechanism where a government can roll back prices that result from profiteering or gouging. That’s the approach that was in our budget. To implement this Liberal idea for a stronger Canada, I ask for your support on July 8.”

Liberals also argued that if Conservatives and New Democrats were serious about addressing the concerns of Canadian consumers, they would have voted for the budget, which had contained sales tax cuts. Politics meet shopping.

“Why did they vote against a budget which was reducing sales tax—taking sales tax completely off clothing and shoes and other goods?” yet another radio ad asked. “Ask yourself that when you buy your next pair of shoes, and you know you’re paying two dollars or three dollars more, or four dollars or five dollars more for your dress or your suit—more than you would have paid if they hadn’t voted against our budget. The Liberal budget would have meant lower prices on clothing, footwear and other essentials. The Liberal budget would have helped you cope with the cost of living.”

With a combination of playing to the fears of consumers and slick, modern campaigning, Trudeau won his majority on July 8, 1974. He thanked Davey with a framed editorial cartoon from the campaign, which Trudeau dedicated to the man “who made the sun shine.” Grafstein would go on to run the Red Leaf consortium for the better part of the next two decades. The whole idea of ad consortiums, in fact, first dreamed up by Norman Atkins, would become a staple of modern Canadian electioneering.

No matter how successful these early ad consortiums were at playing politics, the election campaigns themselves couldn’t sustain a business. Canada was not then, and still isn’t today, a country that sustains a full-time political consulting profession. When all the streamers had been put away and the TV ads were of the air, the ad guys had to make a living with private-sector clients. “My profession is advertising and my hobby is politics,” Norman Atkins was fond of saying. Some of the spillover effect would be immediate: ad firms that did a good job for the party in power would be rewarded with government business once the election was over. “It paid to be in with the government,” Jonathan Manthorpe wrote in his book on the Big Blue Machine. “Large amounts of money were spent each year by most of the government ministries on advertising, and these accounts were seldom tendered for. Awards were made, not on the basis of who could do it most cheaply, but on which firm’s approach the minister liked the best. If a company had a proven ability to work with the Conservatives during an election campaign, then why should they not be equally easy to work with on government business?”

Camp and Associates held the lucrative contract for Ontario’s tourism advertising all the time that Bill Davis was in power, for instance, and Brian Mulroney, once he attained federal office in 1984, would do the same thing. As Mulroney recalled in his book
Memoirs
, “After a victorious campaign, Dalton K. Camp and Associates would lay claim to the government advertising account, and the caravan would move on. Dalton and his brother-in-law Norm Atkins made a great deal of money in this way, hitting the jackpot when I won federally; and the Government of Canada gave them the advertising contract that enabled them, some time later, to sell the company at a handsome multiple.” Meanwhile, the folks from the Red Leaf consortium would get their share of federal Liberal business, too, in between elections.

The cost of being a consumer in Canada continued to escalate in 1975, the year after Trudeau’s Liberals had won power by promising not to legislate controls over wages and prices. On a scorching day at the end of June, Finance Minister John Turner handed down a budget that added an immediate ten cents to the price of a gallon of gasoline at the pump, and another five-cent increase for August. One twenty-seven-year-old resident in the model suburb of Don Mills staged his own intriguing form of consumer revolt at an Esso self-serve station, refusing outright to pay the 71.9-cent price until Parliament made the increase official. “I’m not going to be gouged anymore than I have to be until Parliament passes a law to back up the new excise tax,” Wayne Halse told
The Toronto Star
. He gave his name and address to the attendant, and told him to bill him for the additional fuel costs when the law was passed.

The government, perhaps naively, still seemed to believe that citizens could be rallied away from spending and into a collective project for the national good. All it needed was the right kind of persuasion. In the fall of 1975, the Vickers and Benson team was summoned by Jim Coutts to help in a “special, confidential project.” Through a PR blitz, the government hoped that all good Canadians would come to the aid of restraint. In the memos outlining the need for this program, the Prime Minister’s Office cast the inflation problem as a threat to national stability in the same dimensions as the FLQ terrorist crisis of a few years before. Moreover, the Liberals were in a big political bind—only a year earlier, they had campaigned against wage and price controls. Their only hope now was to recruit the country into a voluntary thrift program. And by now, they realized that if you were trying to get to the hearts and minds of Canadian voters, you had to go the advertising route.