Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them (6 page)

So even in the early twentieth century, Canadians had misgivings about mixing advertising with public institutions—mixing soap and politics, you might say. It was no doubt linked to that older ambivalence about advertising itself—the Barnum vs. Powers debate, cited in the last chapter—and its potential to treat consumers as dupes. Would political advertising be a tool of education about the political process, its people and policies? Or would it just pander to public ignorance? In the Canadian political sphere, parties had been using advertising agencies as far back as the 1800s to help design the posters, billboards and ads they placed before the voters at election time. These too were often blunt appeals to citizens’ consumerist demands. During the height of the 1891 election, for instance, John A. Macdonald’s campaign ran newspaper ads featuring the slogans “Wages higher!”, “Employment plentiful!” and “Living cheaper!”

It was the Second World War, however, that really attached Canadian political leaders to the notion of advertising as an essential tool of government. At the outbreak of the war, in 1939, Prime Minister Mackenzie King set up a Bureau of Public Information, which reported directly to him. The bureau’s mission was to stay on top of the mood and opinion of the electorate, employing all the latest tools of the emerging research into psychology and advertising. With about one hundred people on staff, the bureau produced a constant flurry of patriotic propaganda in the forms of radio broadcasts, films and posters to keep Canadians supporting the war effort. Advertising had formally become an arm of government.

John Davidson Ketchum, a University of Toronto psychology professor and pioneer in bringing market research methods to government, had some reservations about using hard-sell techniques from the ad world to shape opinion on something as important as a war. In a report titled “Ballyhoo in Wartime,” Ketchum wrote, “A Victory Loan is still launched like a new brand of soap flakes; a wounded fighter gets the same buildup as a Hollywood starlet.”

There again was the soap refrain: wartime duty and sacrifice were being sold to Canadians like a cleaning product.

Canada’s Mad Men

Any fan of the TV series
Mad Men
will know that the serious cultural clout of the advertising agencies arrived in the 1950s and 1960s, at the dawn of the television age and during the great expansion of the consumer economy.

In the political world, the ad men first arrived in the halls of power in the form of “public relations” experts. In August 1953, the
Wall Street Journal
reported that a man named Walter Williams would be getting an office at the White House with the duty of “selling” the president. An anonymous White House official put it in terms that any businessman could understand: “We all suddenly realized we were busy manufacturing a product down here, but nobody was selling it.” That distinction—between making a product and selling it—would be an important clue to understanding where the economy and culture of North America was headed in the final half of the twentieth century. The people who understood this evolution in the commercial world would have an advantage, and the same would also turn out to be true in the political world.

Canada doesn’t have a geographical equivalent to Madison Avenue, but the big ad firms in the 1950s and 1960s were concentrated mainly in downtown Toronto. And it did have its “Mad Men”—bright, creative minds plying their arts in the consumer marketplace and the political market, too. At the time, Toronto was home to around 700,000 citizens—1.1 million if you counted all the surrounding suburbs that now make up the Greater Toronto Area. The CN Tower had not yet been built in the 1950s, nor had most of the skyscrapers. The Royal York, on Front Street, was the most imposing building on the skyline, and the subway, with its first 7.5 kilometres of tracks rolled out in 1954, was still brand new. Throughout its construction, Torontonians sang along with a catchy tune that was written just for the occasion and played in constant rotation on the radio: “Yes, we’re gonna have a subway in Toronto. We’ve got to get the working man home pronto.”

It was the 1957 federal election that gave the Canadian ad men their first serious entree from downtown Toronto directly into the inner political-strategy circles. The Conservative party, with its new leader John Diefenbaker, had assembled a backroom operation for this election that put two private-sector marketing experts at the top of the organizational chart—a first in Canadian political history.

Those two men were Allister Grosart and Dalton Camp. Grosart was a fifty-year-old Toronto advertising executive who had worked with successive provincial Conservative governments in Ontario. Camp, then thirty-six, was an ad executive and gifted copywriter who had extensive experience in Conservative politics, especially in his home province of New Brunswick. Both men viewed politics as something separate from advertising, believing that while the two worlds shared some traits, not everything learned in the consumer marketplace could be transferred to the realm of higher, public service. Camp would write in later memoirs of his constant efforts to reassure politicians about the “strange new circumstances, mostly unpleasant,” that advertising imposed on politics. Grosart, meanwhile, had penned a memo for the 1953 federal election with explicit warnings about respecting the distinction between ads for products and ads for politicians, which naturally mentioned soap (well, detergent). Some of Grosart’s warnings, read through the prism of twenty-first-century political salesmanship, now look quaint, and show us just how far things have moved from a half-century ago:

The commercial product analogy must not, however, be carried too far. Experience proves that many of the successful techniques of product merchandising are not applicable in the political field… We do not have the endless “second chances” which are heavily relied on in a long-term product campaign. We have less control over our field force and no reliable daily “sales” reports to guide our market tactics. We are denied most of the “shock” techniques of commercial advertising… We must therefore choose carefully between product techniques but we cannot afford to ignore the vast store of knowledge of how public attitudes react to believable quality claims and can be motivated to the desired mass action. As we pick and choose we remember, for example, that we do not sell the benefits of a correspondence course or the Encyclopedia Britannica as we would detergents or cigarettes.

Camp had chosen the advertising business because he felt it would give him self-sufficiency from the whimsical ups and downs of political life, when a person could be in favour one day, out of favour the next. His first job was at J. Walter Thompson ad agency in Toronto, where he learned the trade by writing ads for Wrigley’s gum. He quickly rose up the ladder of the Thompson firm and was promoted to creative director within two years of his arrival. He then leaped to Locke Johnson, a rival agency in Toronto. While there, Camp got his big break in 1952, when he took a leave of absence to help run the New Brunswick Conservative election campaign. The Conservatives hadn’t been expected to win, and Hugh John Flemming, the leader, had misgivings about why advertising was even necessary. But Camp, installed at the Lord Beaverbrook Hotel, was determined to prove him wrong.

He hired Jack Fenety at the CFNB radio station to read one-minute commercials, which Camp would hammer out on a typewriter before the broadcast. He commissioned a young cartoonist named Duncan Macpherson to draw four cartoons for the Tory campaign. (Macpherson would go on to become one of the leading political cartoonists in the country.) He also poured his writing gift into opinion columns, strategically placed in paid- advertising space in the papers. They appeared under the pseudonym “L.C. House,” which was a play on the “let’s clean house” slogan for the Conservative campaign (it wouldn’t be political advertising without some reference to soap or cleaning, after all). Clearly, New Brunswick’s voters were in housecleaning mood. Flemming pulled off a surprise victory and Camp was given a large part of the credit. Once Flemming was premier, Locke Johnson was given the New Brunswick tourism account—thus establishing a pattern that would be repeated whenever Camp helped Conservatives win provincial and federal elections in decades to follow.

In 1957, the federal Progressive Conservative party was also dreaming of an unexpected, come-from-behind victory. The Liberals had been governing Canada for most of the century and had a hammer-hold on power after the Second World War—from the final years of Mackenzie King’s rule and then, after he stepped down in 1948, under Louis St. Laurent. The Liberals not only presided over the institutions of power—they
were
the institutions of power. They ran their election campaigns as they ran their governments: in low-key, bureaucratic fashion. Political science professor Paul Fox described it this way: “The Liberal government aims at operating noiselessly, like a respectable mammoth business corporation which fears nothing more than making people aware that it is there.” It also helped that Canada’s citizens were awash in their new consumerism, shopping their way into seeming complacency about political affairs in the 1950s, content to leave them to the “organization men” in the Liberal party.

But in 1957, the Conservatives, with the help of the ad men, were about to use what they were learning about consumer-citizens to shake up the way political campaigns were run in Canada—permanently.

Under the direction of Camp and Grosart, the Conservative campaign was organized entirely around John Diefenbaker, the leader. Leaders had always been important in political races in Canada, but Camp and Grosart, the ad men, used their skills to make the leader the “product” as well. Local campaigns featured Dief prominently. “On Monday, June 10, make a date with Diefenbaker” the signs read, then went on to name the local Tory candidate as a secondary aside. Camp and Grosart fashioned advertising that played up the image of Diefenbaker as an energetic, populist visionary. Campaign posters had a big, black slogan, “It’s Time for a Diefenbaker Government,” with the Progressive Conservative party in tiny print in the bottom corner. Meanwhile, the Liberals were running a steady-as-she-goes campaign, which was clearly proving to be a misread of the consumerist, advertising-age times. Where St. Laurent was awkward and television-averse, for instance, Diefenbaker’s oratory seemed to soar in the broadcast media.

As John Duffy describes it in
Fights of Our Lives
, a book on pivotal Canadian elections in history, this 1957 campaign was essentially a showdown between institutional politics and consumerist politics:

The Liberal show was suffused with the production values of the House of Commons: ministerial speaking tours; the stately, even remote figure of a prime minister; and the low-key deflation of opponents’ charges through irony and a gentlemanly smile. It was all very
Q
uestion Period. The Tory effort and its architects anticipated the future generation of private-sector political hit men, TV-pundit strategists, and million-dollar pollsters. Its style was Madison Avenue North: single-minded promotion of the pitchman, relegation of secondary players to the shadows, and abandonment of the brand itself in favour of the spokesperson.

Camp used many ad techniques in the 1957 federal election that had proven successful in the upset New Brunswick win—playing up the leader, playing down the party and presenting the campaign as an opportunity for Canada to “clean house.” One of the more vivid pitches was a full-page newspaper ad, depicting the Peace Tower as a guillotine, with the headline “Black Friday.” Another featured a large photo of Diefenbaker, with quotes from favourable newspaper articles and the slogan, again: “It’s Time for a Diefenbaker Government.” Camp was particularly proud of the way in which the 1957 Conservative ad campaign had cut down the excess verbiage of previous election pitches. Rather than pummel the populace with dense, full-page ads loaded with text, as the McKim agency had done in 1953, Camp boasted that he’d been able to organize an entire election ad campaign with fewer than one thousand words of copy. As well, Camp had cleverly imported a tactic from consumer advertising into the political world—customer testimonials. Many of those words in his ad copy were not his, but excerpts from positive press reviews of Diefenbaker: “A Canadian with a spirit of true Canadianism,” or “He has a first-hand knowledge of the trials and problems, the hopes and dreams of ordinary people.”

The advertising approach to politics clearly wowed the customers, who were in a mood to toss out a Liberal government seen to be too arrogant and plagued by scandal. On June 10, Diefenbaker and the Progressive Conservatives won a minority government, which they would convert into majority rule a year later. Turnout for the 1958 election was nearly 80 percent—the highest-ever turnout figure in the history of the Canadian federation. Populism and pitchmen had sent Canadians flocking to politics in droves, it seems.

Camp, meanwhile, went back to the ad business, setting up his own firm, Camp and Associates, in 1959 with his brother-in-law Norman Atkins. Their first accounts were tourism contracts for the New Brunswick and federal governments, followed quickly by similar tourism accounts from Nova Scotia, Manitoba and Prince Edward Island. Camp, as a gifted writer, had a talent for advertising copy. That talent would be used for corporate clients, too, including Labatt’s, Inco and Telus, as well as the Clairtone Sound Corporation, founded by Peter Munk, who would go on to run Barrick Gold.