Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (5 page)

Before Bernays made that observation, there had been tension in the advertising world between styles of marketing. On the one hand was the “Barnum approach,” from Phineas T. Barnum, the renowned circus master, who was famed for using outrageous stunts to grab the public’s attention. Barnum would become known for his immortal phrase “There’s a sucker born every minute.” Still, his approach to mass persuasion was admired and studied north and south of the forty-ninth parallel. In Canada, magazines such as
Saturday Night
and a trade journal,
Economic Advertising
, pointed to Barnum as a master of publicity. Even the respected economist Harold Innis, conducting his studies of advertising and communications, looked to Barnum for clues to mass persuasion.

On the other hand was the Powers style, so named for John E. Powers, advertising manager of Wanamaker’s, an early US department store, which was focused far more on educating consumers with clearly marked prices and short, concise ad copy. Where Barnum sought to provoke or even shock his audiences, the earnest Powers sought to inform.

“To the extent that the Barnum style played to the gullibility of its audience, there was a degree of condescension in its view of humanity. The public were rubes, at best co-authors of their own illusions. Powers was more inclined to see the public as customers. Customers, seen within the intellectual framework of classical economics, had interests of their own that they sought to maximize in every commercial transaction. They were not to be misled, but assisted in the formation of their purchasing decisions,” advertising professor and author Russell Johnston writes in his book
Selling Themselves: The Emergence of Canadian Advertising
.

It bears keeping that Barnum–Powers distinction in mind as we wind through the ins and outs of political marketing in subsequent chapters. Just as commercial advertisers had widely different views of the consuming public, so too have political marketers had varying views of consumer-citizens. Call it optimism versus pessimism, or reality versus cynicism. Both sides have been able to claim some vindication for their views over the years, often looking to emerging research in psychology to bolster their impressions of their audience.

In Canada, the scientific discipline of psychology found its roots as the study of “mental hygiene” and of eugenics—the pseudo-science devoted to the idea of “improving” races either physically or mentally. After the Second World War, however, when psychology had proven useful—in the selection of officers or even in espionage—psychology found its way into Canadian schools, both for testing students and as a separate discipline at universities. Fledgling market-research companies, still mainly based in the United States, were increasingly attracted to the idea of psychology as a way to track and predict consumer behaviour. The Canadian Psychological Association, founded in 1940, saw its ranks swell from about 150 members to more than 700 in 1955.

As was the case in the United States, the 1950s and 1960s saw psychologists becoming celebrities in their own right, the most famous in the US being Dr. Benjamin Spock, with his child-rearing advice. In Canada, Dr. William Blatz was known as the “Canadian Dr. Spock” for his work on child development and his “security theory.” Another famed Canadian psychologist of the time was Samuel Laycock, from Saskatchewan, who came to early prominence when a criminal lawyer named John Diefenbaker asked him to conduct psychological tests on a seventeen-year-old boy scheduled to hang for a crime. Laycock pronounced the lad a “low-grade moron” and the death sentence was commuted.

Perhaps not surprisingly, given so much change in Canadians’ lives in such a short time, there was also a lot of skepticism about these new-fangled notions behind psychology and advertising. Canadians may have been swept up in their new suburban lives and shopping centres, but they were by no means the brainwashed masses that Bernays may have envisioned. In fact, whether it was the paranoia of the Cold War or just shopping fatigue, by the end of the 1950s Canadians appeared to be already growing wary of all these advertisements saturating their lives. In the United States, Vance Packard published his blockbuster bestseller
The Hidden Persuaders
, showing all the ways in which advertisers were using “strange and rather exotic” arts of psychology to lure unwitting consumers to buy more things.

Canadian advertisers were paying attention to this emerging skepticism about their methods and they worried that the overall credibility of the industry was imperiled. Moreover, there were fears that the government would step in and regulate the industry for them. And so the Canadian Advertising Advisory Board (CAAB) was born in 1957—a joint effort of the Association of Canadian Advertisers and Institute of Canadian Advertising.

This board would prove to be essential in protecting the integrity of advertisers, all through a voluntary code with three basic tenets: truth, fairness and accuracy. The code, still in existence today, spells out all kinds of forbidden ad practices for the commercial sector: no lying about prices or guarantees, no false claims about science or competitors, and so on. Attack ads, which would become a staple of the political world, are strictly frowned upon by the businesses who subscribe to the ad-standards code. “Advertisements must not, unfairly, discredit, disparage or attack one or more products, services, advertisements, companies or entities, or exaggerate the nature or importance of competitive differences” the code states.

So even if Canada was turning into a consumer society in the immediate postwar period, at least it would be an educated consumer society. In
Chatelaine
around this era, the Magazine Advertising Bureau frequently published notices encouraging shoppers to be discerning critics of the ads they were seeing. One read, “If you tried to buy everything that was offered, your money wouldn’t last long. So you become a smart shopper. You choose which things you are going to buy. Isn’t it nice to have choice? Isn’t it good to see so many people trying to please you by turning out ever-improving things?” No one had to read too far between the lines to see the Cold War subtext there: choice equals freedom, and freedom equals happiness, and isn’t that better than life in the cold, grey communist countries?

Canadians weren’t just embracing choice on the store shelves, either. The 1960s would present Canadians with a whole buffet of personal-life choices they hadn’t been free to make before. The 1960s saw the laws changed to make it a lot easier to get divorces, meaning that men and women were no longer stuck for life with the commitment they made at the wedding altar. Women wanted the right to choose when to conceive children, too, and along came the revolutionary invention of the birth control pill, known simply as the pill, to accommodate that desire. It was approved for general sale in Canada in 1961, though it would take another eight years for chemical birth control to be fully legal in this country. Nonetheless, for the thousands, then millions, of women who took the pill, it opened up their reproductive lives to all-important choice. That same virtue would fuel the drive to make abortion legal and accessible.

All of these huge societal changes were creating the conditions for a Canadian consumer state, which would have profound implications for politics and citizens’ relationship to their government. The choice and freedom they saw in their shops they demanded of their political culture, and vice versa. Even by the 1960s, Canada had all the textbook attributes of a consumer culture: increasing availability of consumer goods, the expansion of shopping as a leisure pursuit, political organization by consumers and ever-growing pools of credit and debt. Those conditions would only deepen over the subsequent decades, turning Canada into a consumer nation and Canadians into consumer-citizens.

The proof of that reality? As the twenty-first century dawned, Industry Canada decided to take a sweeping look at consumer trends in Canada. One finding stands out. A focus-group study asked each of the participants: When do you consider yourself a consumer? When you’re shopping? When you’re watching TV? The answer: All the time. Coming through fifty years of the postwar spending spree—including the advent of cars and television, rapid expansion of shopping choice and wide availability of merchandise—Canadians said they were consumers 24-7, and that they saw their entire world as a series of consumer choices. As we’ll see, much of Canada’s democratic culture, from politics to government, has encouraged and obliged this view of consumer-citizenship.

And how would this consumer-citizenship be felt in Canada’s political and civic culture? Well, it started with advertising.

SOLD LIKE SOAP

H
ard as it may be to believe these days, a Canadian soap company once thought politics would help sell its wares. In the late nineteenth century, David Morton and Sons slapped a picture of John A. Macdonald on its bars of N.P. Soap. And for good measure, the soap-maker also created sales posters featuring Canada’s first prime minister holding a three-pound bar of the product, casting a bemused smile above his likeness on the packaging.

About a half-century later, in
Canadian Forum
magazine, a bible of the country’s left wing, a writer named Philip Spencer argued, “In this day and age, until we’ve learned how the technique of selling soap works, we’ll go on making a mighty poor fist of selling socialism to the lower middle and working classes, the younger voters and the women.”

It’s an odd partnership, politics and soap. But it’s an enduring one, lasting long past the days when politicians used to stand on soapboxes at local rallies. For decades now, it seems that whenever we want to talk about the gritty business of politics and advertising, we’re tempted to reach for the soap metaphors. Perhaps it’s a way of washing our hands of the whole business. Canadian political-marketing expert Alex Marland, of Memorial University, found that as far back as 1952 US Democrats complained that early TV ads by the Republicans reduced politics to something sold “like hair tonic or soap.”

“The art of selling politicians like soap on TV” was the headline for a 1980
New York Times
feature on the ways in which the techniques of consumerism and psychology had infiltrated the American political system.

Ronald Reagan, a Hollywood actor, literally did sell soap in the years before he became a politician and ultimately president of the United States from 1980 to 1988. Ads featuring Reagan, shilling for Boraxo hand soap, still live on YouTube, where the then B-list actor is seen in 1960s spots extolling the virtues of “waterless hand cleaner.”

A couple of decades later, installed at the White House, Reagan saw himself, if jokingly, as the actual soap for sale. Ducking his head into a meeting of the powerful ad executives creating his “Morning in America” campaign pitch, Reagan reportedly said, “I understand you guys are selling soap. I thought you’d like to see the bar.”

Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that one of the earliest examples of negative political advertising in Canada came in the form of a radio soap opera, the serialized drama format originally sponsored by household cleaning product manufacturers.

During the 1930s, the Conservatives engaged the services of the J.J. Gibbons advertising firm, which came up with a subversive idea—why not use fiction, on the radio, to tilt Canadians’ views away from the Liberals? And so, at some expense, the Conservatives rolled out six radio dramas, the first lasting fifteen minutes, the rest thirty minutes each, featuring the homespun wisdom of “Mr. Sage.” Listeners to CRBC, the precursor to the modern CBC, were told that Mr. Sage was “an old political observer,” as well as a “friend and neighbour,” who had some pointed views about Mackenzie King and the Liberals.

Mackenzie King, irked that this political fiction was not billed as a Conservative party production, would put in place the legislation that led to the creation of CBC radio as an ad-free medium in 1936. King had always envisioned radio as a way to connect Canadian citizens to their nation—and not to advertisers. In a speech at the Canadian National Exhibition in 1927, King had asked, rhetorically, “May we not predict that as a result of this carrying of the living voice throughout the length and breadth of the Dominion, there will be aroused a more general interest in public affairs, and an increased devotion of the individual citizen to the commonweal?”

Graham Spry, founder of the Canada Radio League, had similar views about radio’s civic potential, saying this new medium in Canadian households “should make the home not merely a billboard, but a theatre, a concert hall, a club, a public meeting, a school, a university.”