A SOFT SELL FOR HARD IDEAS

Don't knock advertisers. Their language is the only one many people understand, says Martin Vander Weyer POLITICAL advertising has acquired demonic associations in recent weeks. Whilst Tory stalwarts have been secretly thrilled by the impact of the red-eyed Blair Poster, the rest of the country has been Pinning horns and a tail on the newly ennobled Maurice Saatchi, whose firm is responsible for the New Labour, new dan- ger' campaign. This may therefore seem like an odd moment to start arguing for more aggressive use of advertising skills in public life.

But to open the debate, let us compare the impact of that devil image with the launch of the benefits fraud hotline, Mr Peter Lilley's latest initiative at the Department of Social Security, with its neat little slogan rhyming 'rip-off with `tip-off. How many of the general public noticed the campaign at all, let alone memorised the hotline telephone num- ber? There is no catchy tune which makes us instantly think 'benefits fraud' in the same way that we think 'Kleenex toilet tissue' or 'Direct Line insurance': 110 cute Gold Blend couple to discuss Which neighbours are abusing the state's benevolence; no startling images, like those in the brilliant current Peugeot ad, Which tell you to discover the hero in Yourself by blowing the whistle on a wel- fare cheat. A month later and the cam- paign is largely forgotten.

Advertising is the most potent and con- centrated form of communication of the late 20th century. A strong advertising campaign embeds itself in the collective Memory like nothing else: we remember trivial toothpaste slogans from 30 years ago (`You'll wonder where the yel-low went . • • ') long after we have forgotten every book that we read or film that we saw in the same era. Surveys demonstrate that consumers often think they have seen, regularly over the preceding weeks, televi- sion advertisements which in fact have not been broadcast for years.

This penetrative power is, of course, a dangerous thing. We might wish that the subconscious were not so susceptible, and we might feel a sense of relief that those who govern us do not command the same hypnotic influence. But we

should also ask ourselves whether gov- ernment would not be more efficient, and political debate more meaningful, if the black art of advertising was used to communicate policy ideas as effectively as it is sometimes used to attack political opponents.

The devil poster vividly demonstrated how effective the medium can be for elec- toral purposes. 'Britain isn't working', the Saatchi brothers' 1978 dole-queue poster for the Conservatives, became an icon of the age. Chris Patten's 'Double whammy' (though few people understood it) and Dr Mawhinney's recent 'New Labour, new dangers' seem to have worked by a process

referred to by admen as `adverticity' — advertising which attracts publicity to itself, and therefore needs relatively little repeti- tion (and relatively little expense) to achieve its effect.

Party political broadcasts are nowadays made in the style of long advertisements, with talking heads appended for gravitas, but it is perhaps a good thing that we do not allow additional space to be bought by candidates, and a good thing that we large- ly reject the American style of 'knocking copy' — typified by a 1968 Democrat ad which simply said, 'Agnew for Vice-Presi- dent' against a background of hysterical laughter, followed by, 'This would have been funny if it weren't so serious.' By con- trast, Margaret Thatcher in 1983 vetoed a Saatchi poster which featured an unkind photograph of Michael Foot with the slo- gan: 'Under the Conservatives all pension- ers are better off.

This is not, therefore, an argument in favour of savage and unrestrained party political advertising. Rather it is an explo- ration of the idea that, whether we like it or not, advertising has the power to influ- ence parts of the population which are deaf to other forms of communication. The Government's ability to manage change and, to use a fashionable word, the inclu- siveness of the political process might be greatly improved by adopting more of the skills of the advertising industry.

'Your mother and I just want you to be happy.' This is, needless to say, a thesis chiefly promoted by practitioners in those skills. They point out that the market into which politicians are selling themselves is largely hostile, and is intermediated between press and television coverage which aims to cheapen, personalise and tear apart every new initiative which , emerges into the public arena. The media certainly does not consider its role to be that of explaining in detail the benefits of government policy.

'If you were going to launch any new product, you'd always use paid advertising rather than just public relations work,' says Bill Husselby, chairman of the Cogent Elliott agency. 'You control the medium if you're paying for it. Complicated messages need repeating to get them across. Thirty years ago, advertising was mostly used for fast-moving consumer goods, nowadays it's used extensively for all kinds of complex services and corporate image-making. But government attitudes to it have barely changed at all in that time.'

The difficulty, as Winston Fletcher of the Bozell agency puts it, is that 'there is no such thing as a non-political message. You may say that once legislation is enact- ed, it is no longer a party political matter and there is every reason why the populace should be helped to understand it by good advertising. But the counter-argument is that anything done in this area is funda- mentally government propaganda.'

The Central Office of Information and the Cabinet Office, through which deci- '1 draw the line at being watered by Camilla Parker Bowles.'

sions on government advertising are channelled, take an extremely cautious line in this debate. Anything which might be interpreted as an endorsement of a political party is ruled out, as is anything which amounts to a message or injunc- tion from a particular minister — though campaigns for privatisation share sales, which some critics would call highly political, have been a money-spinner for the advertising industry for the past 15 years: £30 million went on the British Gas 'Sid' campaign alone.

Army recruitment advertising is a rare example of the sort of material which is considered totally acceptable. Aids

awareness was a legitimate subject, although the way in which the advertising was angled away from the high-risk groups, in order not to victimise them, made much of it a waste of money. Other 'social programming' campaigns, e.g. against drink-driving or in favour of tak- ing care of your heart, are accepted by all except the likes of our own Digby Ander- son, who believes that it is not the role of government to spend public money on telling us how to lead our lives. In the case of campaigns against fire risks in the home, there have even been attempts at cost-benefit analysis, comparing the cost of advertising in selected areas against the estimated savings in those areas from a fall in the number of burning chip pans. But when Michael Heseltine, some years ago, decided that he wanted to advertise the benefits of correct handling of a rather more controversial incendiary device, the nuclear deterrent, in reaction to a barrage of pro-disarmament publici- ty, he was overruled by the Cabinet Secre- tary. The problem is one of balance, or, more importantly, of being open to accu- sations of imbalance. If a politically flavoured policy is to be advertised, surely there must be equal access and funding to put the opposing point of view? And, we might add, surely it is all a waste of money in a non-partisan sense, because people believe politicians even less than they believe advertisements?

It is true that the source can distort the message, but it is also true that advertis

Mg really does reach into people's brains, even when they say it does not. It makes them differentiate avidly between brands of lager which they would never identify in blind tastings, and it attaches associa- tions of luxury, freedom and sex to very ordinary, mass-produced cars. Why have we not had a really persuasive, attractive, multilingual 'British beef is safe' cam- paign running all over Europe? What could advertising do, judiciously applied, for health service reforms or teenage street crime?

These are serious examples. Very few people outside the health service itself understand what has been happening there, and the natural tendency amongst the public is to view the whole pro- gramme with the deepest suspicion. Many people within the health service have a vested interest in painting the changes as blackly as possible. The iner- tia which these reactions cause carries With it a cost — in terms of delays in introducing efficiency measures — which is probably a great deal more than the cost of a national advertising campaign designed to explain to the public why the reforms are a good thing.

As for teenage law and order problems, television advertising is probably the only effective means of communicating direct- ly with the target audience. Nothing else seems to have worked so far, whether it be the threat of boot-camps or the rein- troduction of bobbies on the beat. But a recent advert for Tango soft drinks, in Which an orange monster slapped inno- cent passers-by around the ears, had to be swiftly withdrawn because it caused an epidemic of teenage head-slapping across the nation.

Is it not possible to harness this imita- tive force, to transmit important social messages to the nation's unreachable youth? Let us have a campaign — loud, frenetic, with hand-held cameras, weird effects, Spitting Image puppets and Janet Street-Porter accents — which says, 'Slap your brother's head if he nicks things' or, 'Kicking old gits is uncool'. The admen have all the psychological weaponry at their fingertips to make the message attractive to its chosen audience: that is what they are paid to do.

But such a campaign would inevitably run into trouble. It might be thought to point the finger of blame too plainly at perpetrators rather than at society itself, which is politically incorrect. If it fea- tured any representatives of ethnic minorities at all, it would be condemned as racist. Opponents would say that the money should have been spent on police wages and closed-circuit cameras instead. But if its message got through, just think what savings might be made in police and court time, in insurance claims and spending on home security measures. In Victorian times, missionaries and social reformers would have gone out at night to talk to the criminal classes, like Glad- stone in his pursuit of fallen women. Now we need creative admen to do it, because theirs is the universal language of the modern age.

All of which may sound like an argu- ment in favour of propaganda ministries and social engineering in the manner of Lee Kuan-Yew's Singapore, famed for its 'Toilet of shame' campaign in which widespread advertising of the desirability of flushing public lavatories after use was backed up by an army of plainclothes inspectors whose task was to photograph non-flushers and publish their names and faces on the front pages of local newspa- pers.

We do not want to brainwash or intimi- date our citizens,`but We do want to find a channel of communication which gets through to them. Too much of modern politics is simply lost in the airwaves, dis- torted, misreported, chopped down to trivial soundbites, too boring and remote to distract the attention of the couch- potato generation. A good advertisement, on the other hand, has the power to insinuate itself into the language and the culture — refreshing the parts other words cannot reach, in fact. Let us con- template the impact of the red-eyed Blair poster, and see whether it is possible to use that phenomenon as a wider force for good.