Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (10 page)

Ottawa’s goal was to curb inflation at its current 12 percent rate, to work toward an inflation rate of 8 to 9 percent, to curb inflation without killing jobs, to control government spending and to use the market system to reverse the inflationary trend. The Liberal government turned to Vickers and Benson “to communicate in such a manner as to enlist the intelligent and emotional involvement of the Canadian public.” In essence, it was asking the ad firm to persuade Canadians to be less like consumers, and more like citizens; to be more like Powers than Barnum. It was a far cry, in other words, from the exhortations to spend that Canadians would get in the economic meltdown of 2008. In the 1970s, government still believed it could use advertising to discourage consumerism.

“Trudeau must clearly establish that the time has come for all Canadians to make their choices between those things they need and those they don’t. Canada must be put first… [Citizens’] self-interest will lead to national failure,” Vickers and Benson recommended in its ad plan. And, in a foreshadowing of populist politics to come later in the century, Vickers and Benson also said that restraint, like charity, would have to start close to home. “Since MPs’ salaries appear to be paramount in the public’s mind, consideration should be given to immediately adjusting them downward.”

O’Malley and the team brainstormed slogans to be placed on signs—“Reality before dreams” and “Needs before desires”—and mused whether they could place them in stores. What about a national Pioneer Day, to reacquaint Canadian citizens with their not-so-consumerist past? Perhaps Canadians could rein in their spending through posters asking, “Do you really need it?”

But advertising couldn’t solve this problem. Trudeau, amid turmoil in his government—Turner had abruptly resigned—was forced to go on TV on Thanksgiving and announce that he was legislating wage and price controls. While the political implications of this move were profound and far-reaching, it was also a significant milepost along the route to consumer-citizenship in Canada. Not even advertising, a tool of the marketers, could curb Canadian citizens’ enthusiasm for the consumer marketplace.

SCIENTIFIC SHOPPING

F
or several months in 1940 and 1941,
The Canadian Forum
magazine ran a rather unusual series of stories, in which a man named Philip Spencer argued that socialism could be sold to Canadians like any other household product.
The Canadian Forum
—a bible for the left wing, not known for embracing the free marketplace—was an unlikely vehicle for this kind of thinking. But Spencer argued that politicians could learn something from advertisers about researching the “customers” of democracy, whom he called Mr. and Mrs. Jones.

“Plain and fancy research is part of the everyday routine of the advertisers. Surely, when socialism claims it can produce results infinitely more beneficial to the public than individualist economy—surely socialism should use this means of tapping the mind of Mr. and Mrs. Jones too,” Spencer wrote in the October 1940 issue of the magazine. “When the goodies of socialism are as apparent as the benefits of orange juice, then socialism will be at hand!”

The mysterious Philip Spencer may have been the first modern political-marketing champion in Canada and the first spokesman for consumer-citizenship. (The name was a pseudonym, and after these articles it never appeared in the pages of
The Canadian Forum
again.) He was also a good twenty years ahead of Joe McGinniss and the Nixon presidential campaign in making the connection between politicking and product-selling. Forget politics as a form of educating the masses, Spencer said—if you want to reach people where they live, you needed to appeal to their emotions and impressions. “Until we know what people do and think and read, until we have developed a strategy that is really relevant to the readers of
Popeye
and the listeners [to] Charlie McCarthy, we can’t hope to make socialism the loud, imperative and compelling shout that it should be,” he wrote.

In subsequent articles, readers of the
Canadian Forum
were treated to the findings of a “political consumer survey” Spencer had conducted among the good citizens of Toronto, trying to gauge whether socialist ideas were compatible with their lifestyle habits. He found that lower-income people preferred the comics and sports pages of newspapers and that the only way to reach women was through women’s magazines, where they were engaged in their own “cozy chats about baby’s diet and how [they] stopped middle-aged spread.” On the radio, he said, drama and variety shows were far more popular than news or public affairs broadcasts. Slipping a little editorial commentary into his findings, Spencer pronounced it “nasty” that young people and the lower classes who should be voting for the CCF (the forerunner of the New Democratic Party) were far more interested in “escapism.”

Spencer said disinterested voters presented a special challenge to politics; that they would require much different tactics or entreaties from the socialists. He was making the case for polling and rigorous market research as a way to tailor political appeals to the consumer tastes of voters.

Advertisers, first in the US and then in Canada, had been using market research with increasing frequency and sophistication for a couple of decades already. The University of Western Ontario had become the academic hub of consumer-survey research, through its Department of Business Administration, established in 1927. But in the realm of politics, polling had been used only sparsely by Canadian political parties when Spencer was writing his articles in the 1940s.

The Liberal party had close ties to Cockfield, Brown and Company, which was the first advertising agency to do extensive market research. Throughout the Second World War as well, Mackenzie King’s government had been exploring ways to gather public opinion, relying on research methods advocated by psychology experts such as John Davidson Ketchum from the University of Toronto. Although the original purpose of this research was to mobilize support for the war, King’s Liberals, presumably, could hardly fail to notice a possible political payoff, too. Meanwhile, the Gallup organization and a survey firm called Canadian Facts were conducting preliminary surveys of the Canadian political landscape.

However, it would be a couple more decades until Canadian political parties really caught the polling bug and, no doubt to Spencer’s regret, it wouldn’t be the socialists who first saw the wisdom of using market research to sell politics to the masses. Political market research did begin in earnest, though, at the site of Spencer’s “political-consumer” survey: Toronto, which was also home to the ad business.

“Young Marrieds”

On May 15, 1959, Toronto was experiencing an unseasonable chill, including some late spring flurries, which forced the cancellation of the Friday night Toronto Maple Leafs baseball game. But the economy was heating up. Canada’s burgeoning auto industry had turned out more than eight thousand cars in the previous week, while prices for everyday goods were climbing—a result of an overall recovery in the North American economy.

Canada’s consumer boom had fully arrived by this point, and with it, a radical shift in the everyday circumstances of the typical Canadian family. Children born in the 1950s were growing up in homes very different from the ones lived in by those who were born in the late 1940s. With the rise of convenience products, shopping for the home was replacing working in the home as a primary pursuit—not just for women, but for men, too. In the
Toronto Daily Star
on this chilly Friday, readers were treated to the occupational annoyances of Canada’s cashier of the year, Connie Burridge: “Men are the worst offenders in piling things up, she says. And of course it delays the service. Cashiers are fond of people, usually women, who departmentalize their piles. All the meats together, all the vegetables together, all the frozen foods together. And of course anything that is ‘two for thirty-eight,’ for example, together. Secret of not getting rattled is not to look up on a busy night, she says. ‘If you don’t lift your head and see that crowd waiting to go through, you’ll be all right.’”

Also in this section, on what was commonly called the newspaper’s “women’s pages,” were stories about how to avoid buying bad meat and how to use your new electric mixer to make a quick pie crust, as well as ads for fur storage, bridal gowns, corsets and dress-coat sets. Canada was in a postwar buying boom and citizens were surrounded by fellow shoppers and ad pitches. Automotive giant General Motors, in its own
Star
ad appearing that day, attempted to cut through the noise with some reassuring words for frazzled consumers. Makers of superior products didn’t need to boast, GM said. “On every side, nowadays, the average Canadian is faced with a baffling array of claims and counterclaims… Statistics, figures and comparisons are bandied about, sometimes carelessly.”

And on that same Friday, at Toronto’s CKFH radio station, Keith Davey was making a presentation on how to capture audience and advertisers. CKFH, known today as “The Fan,” began as a sports and news station owned by famed hockey announcer Foster Hewitt (hence the “FH” in the call letters). The station was on the rise, looking for a solid foothold in the growing radio marketplace. The secret, Davey said in his presentation, was to tap into the demographic group with the biggest buying power—“the young marrieds.” He rattled off some statistics: in Toronto, 35 percent of the entire population, 457,000 people, were between the ages of twenty and thirty-nine. Almost all of them were married and in the midst of growing their little families. Annually, Davey said, this group spent about $217 on home furnishings, $697 on automobile costs, $1,011 at grocery outlets, $159 at drug stores, $310 on clothing and about $901 on “general merchandise.” Moreover, Davey said, these “young marrieds” were fuelling demand for new homes—twenty-three thousand were built in the Toronto area the previous year.

Davey said that these young consumers needed a radio show to fit their abiding, if quotidian, interests. How about a “motoring show,” as he called it? (These days, we’d probably call it the “afternoon drive.”) On their way back to their shiny new homes, filled with shiny new merchandise, these people were looking for a soundtrack to match their middling tastes and pursuits, Davey said: “Be sure to avoid any irritating or excitable music, and this includes ‘way out’ jazz.”

Davey, as a “young married” himself, no doubt made a compelling case to his fellow employees at CKFH. He was in his early thirties, living in Don Mills with his own young family, and had a happy-warrior outlook that kept widening his circle of friends. Radio sales may have been Davey’s day job in the late 1950s, but his real passion was politics—specifically, Liberal party politics.

And in this endeavour, the charming Davey was also highly attentive to the emerging field of demographics—could it do for his Liberal party what it did for building radio audiences? His enthusiasm for demographics and statistics was further elevated when he read Theodore White’s 1961 book
The Making of the President
, and began to dream that a prime minister in Canada could be created the same way.

White, in that book, recounted one of the early contests between Kennedy and his Democratic challenger, Hubert Humphrey, in the Wisconsin primary. Although each candidate spent roughly the same amount of money, approximately $150,000, they spent it in radically different ways. Humphrey poured his resources into old-fashioned advertising, relying on the help of volunteers. Kennedy, however, had pollster Louis Harris on staff, and, as White put it, “Harris’ polling of twenty-three thousand Wisconsin voters was not only the largest ever done in a single state but invaluable in informing his candidate of moods.” Humphrey himself would tell Harris that the comparison between the two campaign approaches was like “a corner grocer running against a chain store.”

The shopping metaphor was entirely apt. Though Harris had specialized in political polling since beginning his career and founding his own firm in the 1950s, it was the corporate and commercial sector in the United States that first embraced polling as the growth elixir. George Gallup, the grandfather of political polling, got his start in the United States at the Young & Rubicam advertising firm in the 1930s and spent the 1940s doing survey research for Hollywood. Pointedly, Gallup refused to work for political parties, arguing it would compromise the independence of his polling. So when Gallup did do research on the democratic issues of the day, he financed his surveys with his commercial work. The pattern was set early—pollsters would make their main money in the private sector, but their reputation in the political realm. The same had been true in the advertising world.