Early History of Marketing and Public Relations in Politics

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the rise of an industry of campaign consultants drawn from the fields of marketing and advertising displaced an earlier partisan culture and altered the nature of politics in the United States. With changes in transportation, advertising, and journalism at the turn of the century, an industry of consultants supplanted the parties in dealing with everything from financial bookkeeping and the scheduling of appearances by candidates to the writing of campaign literature and the placement of advertisements in newspapers and, later, on the radio.

In the last decade of the nineteenth century, major figures bridged the world of campaigning with that of advertising. In the ensuing decades, it became more difficult to distinguish the campaigning of elected officials from that of commercial advertising. For the 1920 Republican ticket of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, advertising executives Albert Lasker and William Wrigley Jr. lent a hand in the election, holding events at Harding's Ohio home, including an exhibition baseball game with the Chicago Cubs and visits by silent motion picture actors and actresses, including Al Jolson. Ten years later, Democratic National Committee Chairman James Farley used the latest in polling to keep a watchful eye on the movements of the Depression era. The White House scoured the speeches, radio addresses, and literature of groups like the Share Our Wealth movement and the radio broadcasts of Father Charles Coughlin. In the 1936 race against President Franklin Roosevelt, the radio ads by Republican nominee Alfred Landon were by most accounts the first use of regionally tailored advertising techniques in the era of radio broadcasting, a development that was extended shortly after the rise of television in the early 1950s.

Through the late 1940s, polling and public opinion techniques grew by leaps and bounds, paralleling the rise of television. In the 1952 presidential election, a new political era dawned. Television, in the words of historian Joel Silbey, " sharply broke with a partisan presentation of reality" (Silbey 1991: 242). The election marked the emergence of the media consultant, as the Eisenhower campaign drew from the latest in professional advertising and television production. The Republicans employed the advertising firm of Batten, Barton, Durstine, and Osborn as well as writers with Readers Digest and even cartoonists with the Walt Disney Corporation. Professionals purchased time from local television stations, checked the lighting and the sound for Eisenhower's television appearances, supervised his makeup, wrote text, and arranged sets.

The Kennedy presidential campaign in 1960 took polling to new heights, commissioning dozens of polls and retaining the services of professional media consultants, including the Simulmatics Corporation. Working with the Roper Public Opinion Research Center in Connecticut, Simulmatics' political scientists broke the electorate down into 180 different voter types. Their typologies presented a detailed portrait of the American electorate. " A single voter type, " wrote Ithiel de Sola Pool and Robert Abelson of Simulmatics, " might be Eastern metropolitan, lower-income, white, Catholic female Democrats. Another might be border-state, rural, upper-income, white, Protestant male independents" (1961: 168). The Democratic ticket went on to use these typologies in new ways, including ad spots featuring Jacqueline Kennedy speaking in Spanish, which aired heavily in media markets in Texas during the 1960 race.

Whereas the political parties of the nineteenth century rallied around what historian Joel Silbey describes as " Organize! Organize! Organize! " (1991: 46-71), the parties repositioned themselves by the middle of the twentieth century around what is described here as a political culture of " Advertise! Advertise! Advertise! " Today, this is being supplanted by a new political culture in which campaigns must adapt to what Joe Andrew, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, recently described as " Customize, Customize, Customize" (Milbank 1999: 25). The period from the late 1800s to the present, then, marks a time of far-reaching change in the parties and the rise of newer forms of campaigning, collapsing the distinction between commercial and political advertising even further in the 1990s.