Added: 12/15/2005 |
Evolution of political adsMost Americans older than fifty still remember the image of a girl, picking petals off a daisy with that of an atomic bomb exploding. It was one of those political ads, which intended to raise fears about Barry Goldwater's inclination to start a nuclear war. Goldwater threatened to sue Johnson for a libel; thus, this ad ran only once on CBS on September 7. However, despite the retreat, after the controversy was publicized, the ad was repeatedly shown in the news.
The "Daisy" ad is one of the nearly hundred ads, featured in their entirety in "Political Advertisement 2000". It is a one-hour video, representing twelve presidential elections and fifty years of political ads, edited chronologically and without any commentary by artists Antoni Muntadas and Marshall Reese. It does not only offer an overview of the history of election politics and political advertising on TV, though it also highlights how politicians try to introduce themselves as heroes, how they try to differentiate themselves from their opponents and how they attack each other.
When the Spanish artist Antoni Muntada met the MIT political scientist Edward Diamond, who was then working on "The Spot" (a book about the history of political advertising), he took an interest in political ads. Some materials in "Political Advertisement 2000" are taken from Diamond's own collection. The difference is that Diamond describes and analyses the evolution of political ads for his readers, and Muntada and Reese let the material speak for itself.
Does Money Buy Votes? Increase of spending on television ads is endless. It raises questions about the impact of these ads. Can money buy enough airtime to decide an election? Do paid political ads make images become more important than issues?
"If you see any decontextualized ads," says Muntadas, "you start to question the idea of truth in the words and the images you see." When viewers see political ads on their television sets, they more or less passively receive a political or an emotional message. "Political Advertisement" lets them see all the tricks, the strategies, the way the candidates look the same and talk the same, even though they constantly contradict one another - all these factors stand out once the ads are taken out of context.
Muntada's and Reese's enterprise shows the evolution of the techniques of political ads (today they are more often created by a political advertising agency). It starts with "Eisenhower Answers America", where average Americans ask a candidate questions and get a brief answer from a straight, standing general. After that, the video takes the viewers to 1960 Kennedy ads that made use of political friends and families, such as Eleanor Roosevelt.
Campaigns started using aggressive, negative ads. Earlier ads focused on the image of candidates. A newer generation does not even show a candidate, but instead uses a voiceover to criticize the adversary. These ads are noticeably more sophisticated. A good example is the 1968 Nixon anti-crime ad. It shows a woman, walking alone, clearly scared by the sound of her own footsteps, which resonate in the silent night. Then, the voiceover starts enumerating statistics about crimes and you expect to see a man jump into the screen to attack the woman. However, nothing happens to her and you feel relieved. You realize that you have been tricked into feeling the same anxiety the woman was supposed to feel.
"Political advertisement has changed," Muntada notes. "At first, ads gave information. With the evolution of advertising, ads give less information about the product, and they are more about the strategy. What they want is to get people to buy the product - a candidate."
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