Dollarocracy (22 page)

The nature of oligopolistic advertising leads to two paradoxes. First, the more products are alike and the more their prices are similar, the more the firms must advertise to convince people these products are different. Second, the more firms advertise to distinguish themselves from their competition, the more commercial “clutter” is created in the media and in the general culture. As a result, firms are forced to increase their advertising that much more to pierce through the clutter and reach the public.
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If there is anything close to an iron law in advertising, it is this: repetition works; the more exposure to a brand's advertising, the better. This follows from the conclusion drawn from social science research: people are more inclined to believe what they have heard before.
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Repetition doesn't guarantee success, but it increases the odds considerably.

This, we submit, is a good and necessary way to understand the practices of the money-and-media election complex and the content of much of political advertising. It flows from the approach Reeves laid out nearly six decades ago: “I think of a man in a voting booth who hesitates between two levers as if he were pausing between competing tubes of tooth paste in a drugstore. The brand that has made the highest penetration on his brain will win his choice.”
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Television provides a superpowerful mechanism to penetrate that brain. As TV political advertising's role has grown, an industry has emerged with experts who refine its use strategically and tactically. Research is done to determine what appeals will work with the target audience to get the desired
results, and advertising is produced to generate the appeal.
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The way to success is to relentlessly pound the message home. The more exposure to the ad, the greater the likelihood of brain penetration. As the president of a polling firm put it in 2012, “After the 5th, 6th, 7th, or 8th or 20th time—that's when the ad may start to resonate with people.” Research shows that even if you say you are appalled by the repetition, it “probably won't make you vote against someone.”
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In true Reevesian fashion, that the issues selected may be inconsequential, or that the positions presented in the ads may be misleading, or that the politician's performance in office if elected will have no connection to the position in the ads is just built into the process. The basics of how the corporate economy is structured or how U.S. foreign policy is made are pretty much off the table, much like price and product information in beer advertising, because the two parties largely concur on the most important matters of governance. As Glenn Greenwald observed during the 2012 presidential campaign, the “propaganda orgy” promotes the notion of “vibrant political debate and stark democratic choice, even as many of the policies that are most consequential . . . —the ‘war on drugs,' the supremacy of the covert national security and surveillance states, vast inequalities in the justice system, crony capitalism that rapidly bolsters the oligarchy that owns the political process—are steadfastly ignored because both parties on those issues have exactly the same position and serve the same interests.”
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To the extent that those subjects are broached, it is largely done in an opportunistic and manipulative manner, based upon buzzwords fire-tested by research on the target audience. So it was in the 2012 presidential campaign that fully 10 percent of campaign ads by both parties between June and September singled out the financial sector for criticism. These messages appealed to a population with serious concerns about the role of big banks in the American political economy, but they were mostly bogus, as both parties were soliciting massive contributions from the same sector and were demonstrated advocates of Wall Street's interests.
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As Peter Baker of the
New York Times
politely put it, “The relationship between what the presidential candidates say on the campaign trail and what they do once elected can be tenuous.”
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Let's start then with the premise that the content of political advertising will have all the value of a commercial for beer or soft drinks. That the material
in the ads may be factually inaccurate or, more likely, may be decontextualized half-truths or quarter-truths is not a surprise, or a pressing concern to those producing the ads. Romney's creative director in 2012 was Jim Ferguson, former president of Young & Rubicam, the nation's largest agency. Ferguson had produced some of TV's most memorable campaigns, such as “Beef: It's What's for Dinner” and “Nothing but Net,” a Super Bowl commercial for McDonald's featuring Michael Jordan and Larry Bird.
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Ferguson made two hundred spots for Romney in 2012. “We were making commercials every day. We would test everything. We'd see what resonated with people and would pick a commercial or two to get ready for broadcast.”
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Vinny Minchillo, a Madison Avenue veteran who also worked for Romney, bragged that they had “an in-house ad team that could turn a gaffe into a spot in 90 minutes.”
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According to the most comprehensive research on the topic, nearly all political ads “make at least a limited appeal to emotions,” particularly enthusiasm and fear, “and a substantial majority make a strong emotional appeal.”
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Julian Kanter, curator of the Political Commercial Archive of the University of Oklahoma, observed that in TV political ads “the most important messages are those that are contained in the visual imagery.” That imagery, he pointed out, “can be used to create impressions that are untrue.” Through such visual tricks, campaigns duck the scrutiny they might face when only the words in the script are read.
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That the material in the ads may not be pertinent to the real issues the candidates will be addressing once in office or the actions they might take on those issues is beside the point. The point is to win elections by any means necessary.

No one understood this better than Lee Atwater, the political mastermind who guided George H. W. Bush's successful 1988 presidential campaign. Atwater explained that the battle between the two parties was always about winning the “populist vote.” “It is always the swing vote,” he said. This was all done through political marketing and, as Atwater conceded, had little to do with how either party would actually govern.
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By the 1990s, research demonstrated that most candidates had little or nothing to do with the marketing of their campaigns and the content of the advertising. This became the domain of the professional consultant, whose job is to win elections, period.
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Moreover, the two paradoxes of commercial advertising apply as well. First, candidates with less tangible records to distinguish themselves from
their opponents have to spend more to create the sense that there is a meaningful difference. Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich, for example, need to spend less to make clear they stand in fundamental opposition to their competition even within their own party. Second, when the competition spends a great deal on advertising, that puts extreme pressure on a candidate to match the advertising and, ideally, up the ante. This applies to the Pauls and Kuciniches as well as everyone else if they are serious about winning.

As the clutter increases, the only course is to push down harder on the political advertising accelerator, not hit the brakes. There is also a certain desperation to break through the clutter and create an ad that will be noticed. So it was in 2012 that outside groups supporting the Romney campaign began using cute babies in attack ads on Obama. “Scare tactics are nothing new,” one ad industry executive with experience in politics said, “but with babies? This goes to new extremes.”
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Importantly, recent research confirms that, even though TV ads are clearly effective, the positive effect of ads decays quickly, so it is important once one goes on the air, to stay at full speed until Election Day.
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Everything else being relatively equal, the candidate with a decisive TV advertising war chest will win. “Advertising effects emerge most clearly,” political scientist John Sides wrote, “when one side can out-spend the other—and by a lot.”
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This pattern has been confirmed in recent political science research examining whether voters in presidential elections vote “correctly.” Drawing from exhaustive research to determine voters' political ideology, Sean Richey of Georgia State University then determined whether voters vote for the candidate who best represents their politics. He found that between 1972 and 2004, where his research ends, as many as 20 percent of voters voted “incorrectly.” What is important for our purposes is that the research suggests that if a campaign significantly outspends its opponents “to do more persuasive manipulation than the other campaign,” it can increase the number of “incorrect” voters it gets compared to its opponent. “Generally,” Richey put it, “voters do not have the knowledge skills to overcome manipulation.” By Richey's calculation, the spending imbalance in favor of Republicans was sufficient for George W. Bush to purchase enough incorrect votes to change the 2000 and 2004 elections from defeats to victories.
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Perhaps no campaign better exemplifies the logic of commercial advertising than that of Barack Obama's presidential run in 2007–2008. “I serve as a
blank screen,” he wrote presciently in his 2006
The Audacity of Hope
, “on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”
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“By the time he won the presidential election, the Barack Obama brand had become a worldwide wonder,” media scholar Leonard Steinhorn noted. “He had become an icon, someone who seemed to embody our most personal aspirations and hopes, a larger-than-life figure who exceeded the powers and abilities of any mere mortal.”
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Obama's marketing team put together such an extraordinary advertising campaign—“Change You Can Believe In”—that it was awarded
Advertising Age
's “Marketer of the Year” for 2008. To win the award, Team Obama needed to get the most votes from the attendees at the annual conference of the Association of National Advertisers, people who know a good sales pitch when they see one. The runners-up included Nike and Coors beer.
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In retrospect, Obama's advertising campaign was ambiguous, if not vacuous or deceptive, in terms of governance and policy—though that is now accepted as par for the course. Everyone else does it, the conventional wisdom goes, so why hold Obama to a higher standard? McCain's campaign slogan was “Country First.” The candidates could have easily swapped campaign slogans in the summer of 2007, and it would have had no effect on their actual policy positions. This isn't a bull market for nothing.

The Obama campaign underlined another aspect of commercial advertising that applies full force to political advertising: it works! Back in the 1970s, there was a branch of academic scholarship arguing that political advertising was not especially effective or even necessary for electoral success. Today those arguments can be filed away with the claims that cigarette smoking has no connection to lung cancer. “We can say confidently that ads are persuasive, especially if you have more ads than your competitor,” Travis Ridout and Michael Franz, two leading researchers who have devoted careers to the subject, wrote in 2011, noting that leading research confirmed “ad effects were also more widespread than we had predicted.” “We have found that televised political advertising influences people's voting choices, and more specifically, we have shown that ads are having their greatest influence on those who are the least informed about politics.” “Ads have greater influence,” they added, “in highly competitive races.”
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The most comprehensive examination of the 2008 presidential race—Kate Kenski, Bruce Hardy, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson's award-winning
The
Obama Victory
—confirms that Obama's ability to greatly outspend McCain for television political advertising in battleground states as well as nationally was significant. Controlling for other variables in evaluating daily tracking polls, the authors determined “that weeks in which Obama outspent McCain on national ads are significantly related to an Obama vote ‘if the election were held today.'” Specifically, the research determined that in battleground states Obama's ability to put far more advertising on the air all but destroyed McCain's hopes for victory.

“Whenever we grabbed a lead, a little toehold in a state,” a McCain media person stated, Obama would dump in a wave of new TV advertising “and explode the whole thing out for us.” The authors did not claim that Obama's advertising necessarily won him the election, but at the very least, it may well have been decisive in traditionally Republican-leaning states such as Indiana, North Carolina, Florida, and Virginia, where the spending advantage was large and the vote tally was close.
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Likewise in 2010, the new wave of Republican outside groups outspent Democratic ones 2 to 1, largely in tight battleground races, and, as one commentator noted, accordingly “annihilated them at the polls.”
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Crucially, research also suggests that television political advertising is even
more
effective in House and Senate races, not to mention other races further down the political food chain. “In presidential campaigns, voters may be influenced by news coverage, debates, or objective economic or international events,” Darrell M. West wrote in a book for the Congressional Quarterly Press in 2010. “These other forces restrain the power of advertisements and empower a variety of alternative forces. In congressional contests, some of these constraining factors are absent, making advertisements potentially more important. If candidates have the money to advertise in a congressional contest, it can be a very powerful force for electoral success.”
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