MUSEUM OF TELEVISION & RADIO SCREENING SERIES, THE:
MADISON AVENUE GOES TO WASHINGTON: THE HISTORY OF
PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN ADVERTISING {NARRATED BY
TIM RUSSERT}
Summary
In the summer of 1952, veteran adman Rosser Reeves
approached a group of Dwight Eisenhower supporters
with a revolutionary idea: why not run television
commercials touting their presidential candidate?
Reeves -- a hard-sell prophet celebrated for his "melts
in your mouth, not in your hands" commercials for M&MÕs
and his hammer-pounding spots for Anacin -- had
approached Republican presidential hopeful Thomas
Dewey about running ads four years earlier, but Dewey
had dismissed the idea as undignified. Resistance was
initially stiff within the Eisenhower camp as well, but
Reeves ultimately prevailed, and later that year
Eisenhower taped a series of spots titled "Eisenhower
Answers America" -- the first presidential commercials
ever to run on television.
While the ads probably had little impact on EisenhowerÕs
victory over Adlai Stevenson -- Reeves himself once
said, "It was such a landslide that it didnÕt make a
goddamn bit of difference whether we ran the spots or
not" -- they heralded a revolution in American politics.
Just four years before, Harry Truman had trekked 31,000
miles across America to shake the hands of 500,000
people; in 1952 Eisenhower made a single trip to New
York to film three dozen commercials, each of which
could be seen on as many as 19,000,000 television sets
across the country. The age of the whistle-stop
campaign was ending; the era of the televised campaign
had begun. Today, political ads may well be the
dominant means by which presidential candidates
communicate their messages to voters. Certainly, they
are a vital component of any serious campaign; each
candidate must shell out over a hundred million dollars
to create and air ads if he or she has any hope at all
of winning.
Madison Avenue Goes to Washington: The History of
Presidential Campaign Advertising, presented by the
Museum in association with the University Library and
the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, is a
compendium of the most memorable and historically
significant presidential commercials created from 1952
through 1996 for twelve general elections. This
screening, which includes narration placing the ads in
historical context, traces the evolution of presidential
advertising from crudely produced, hastily thrown
together novelty items featuring candidates in stilted
studio shots to intricately researched, rigorously
tested spots featuring state-of-the-art production and
marketing techniques.
Viewed together as they are here, these commercials
also offer a remarkable opportunity to bear witness to
the evolving preoccupations of American politicians and,
by extension, the American people, from the "red scare"
of the fifties to the domestic upheaval of the sixties,
from the Watergate-induced anomie of the seventies to
the end of the Cold War and the emergence of a new
world order in the eighties and nineties. Equally
fascinating is the way in which so many themes
resurface time and again. One case in point: When Bill
ClintonÕs campaign advisers insisted that it was "the
economy, stupid" in 1992, they essentially were making
the same point Eisenhower had made forty years earlier
when responding to a question about the high cost of
living in an "Eisenhower Answers America" commercial.
The 1950s: Although the 1952 election introduced the
presidential-campaign spot, most paid political
broadcasts were fifteen or thirty minutes long,
preempting regular programming. The most famous of
these -- the so-called Checkers speech -- aired on
September 23, 1952, when Republicans purchased a
half-hour block for vice-presidential hopeful Richard
Nixon, who had been accused of having a slush fund. The
1956 contest -- also between Eisenhower and Stevenson
-- featured the first-ever negative commercials, from
StevensonÕs campaign. Key Ads of this decade:
"Eisenhower Answers America"; NixonÕs Checkers speech;
StevensonÕs "Man from Liberty" spot.
The 1960s: With sets in nine of every ten American
homes, the 1960 campaign between John F. Kennedy and
Richard Nixon demonstrated that television had become a
significant force in American politics. Nixon, seeking
to keep his distance from Madison Avenue, formed an
in-house agency, Campaign Associates -- the first
agency ever spawned solely to run a campaign -- and
technological advances led to the first on-location
campaign commercials. The 1964 campaign between
Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater was the first
dominated by communications specialists like Tony
Schwartz, who eschewed hard-sell advertising in favor
of emotion-based appeals, and it was -- in the opinion
of scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson -- the most negative
campaign in American politics until 1988. Key Ads of
this decade: Kennedy dismisses fears about his
Catholicism; Eisenhower cannot cite a significant
contribution from Nixon over the previous eight years;
NixonÕs dramatic still-photo spots of 1968 appeal to
"forgotten Americans"; JohnsonÕs "daisy" spot questions
GoldwaterÕs emotional stability.
The 1970s: In 1972, Richard NixonÕs ad-hoc November
Group -- burdened by polls showing Nixon was respected
but not well-liked -- settled on the campaign theme "You
Need Nixon," emphasizing his incumbency and experience.
George McGovernÕs ads, from cinema veritŽ pioneer
Charles Guggenheim, addressed the Vietnam War but
largely skirted Watergate, as evidence had yet to emerge
linking Nixon to the scandal. Key Ads of this decade:
NixonÕs trio of "Democrats for Nixon" spots; McGovernÕs
cinema veritŽ spots; and the unaired spot by Tony
Schwartz in which a Vietnamese woman clutches a dead
infant in her arms.
The 1980s: In the 1984 campaign, featuring Ronald
Reagan and George Bush against Walter Mondale and
Geraldine Ferraro, a popular incumbent parlayed peace
and prosperity into reelection. The 1988 contest
between George Bush and Michael Dukakis is now widely
considered the most negative presidential campaign in
American history. Key Ads of this decade: ReaganÕs
"Morning in America" and bear spots; MondaleÕs
Reaganomics spots; the RepublicansÕ 1988 Willie Horton,
Boston Harbor, and tank spots.
The 1990s: The 1992 campaign among George Bush, Bill
Clinton, and Ross Perot -- coming on the heels of the
1988 contest -- received greater press scrutiny than any
previous campaign, with newspapers and television
networks launching "adwatches" evaluating campaign
spots for fairness and accuracy. PerotÕs
attention-grabbing long-form commercials were a
throwback to the earliest days of presidential
advertising. Key Ads of this decade: Bush spots
highlighting his own military career and attacking
ClintonÕs explanation for escaping the draft; Clinton
reminding voters of BushÕs pledge not to raise taxes;
PerotÕs chart-enhanced budget analyses.
Details
- NETWORK: N/A
- DATE: 2000
- RUNNING TIME: 1:27:25
- COLOR/B&W: Color
- CATALOG ID: T:60352
- GENRE: N/A
- SUBJECT HEADING: Advertising, political; Commercials, political; U S - Presidential elections
- SERIES RUN: N/A
- COMMERCIALS: N/A
CREDITS
- Tim Russert … Narrator
- George Bush
- Bill Clinton
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- Barry Goldwater
- Willie Horton
- Lyndon B. Johnson
- John F. Kennedy
- George McGovern
- Walter Mondale
- Richard M. Nixon
- Ross Perot
- Ronald Reagan
- Tony Schwartz
- Adlai Stevenson