Political Advertising According to Berger: It Does Matter!

In his “Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to Visual Communication”, Arthur Asa Berger discusses concept of negative advertising, its pro and cons, its importance in western society, its aspects and strategies, and finally its relation to the truth.

First, when explaining his reasons to focus on this topic, he says: “from my perspective, political advertising can be seen as the most important genre of advertising,” (86). In order to demonstrate, he underlines the fact that politics plays an important role in our lives, and our choice of leaders is crucial, not like picking chips for a movie. In short, our choice of chips can be based on any possible nonsense, because there is no social consequence following, but our choice regarding politics should be based on valuable information. Moreover, because most people source mainly from TV spots, political advertising becomes the primal source of information for voters and that makes it and its content extremely important. “Advertising is a tool that enables politicians to send their messages to a large number of people who tend to be apolitical, who are not particularly interested in political campaigns,” he explains (86). “It is estimated that by a ratio of something like four to one, Americans get their information about the positions of candidates from advertising rather than the news,” (93).


Further, the author divides political advertising into categories and ranges them according to their appropriate timing alongside the campaign. He distinguishes identification spots, argumentative spots (“which present candidate positions on issues,” he explains), attack spots (or negative advertising), and “positive visionary appeals, which are used at the end of a campaign to give voters a reason to vote for the candidate,” (93).

Next, he discusses effectiveness of political ads and concludes that: “People always say, in polls, they don’t like negative campaigns but voting records seem to indicate that they are affected or influenced by them. Numerous case studies of elections show that negative campaigns, full of attack commercials, are effective,” (92).

Flowingly, he raises the issue of media approach towards political advertising and criticizes their lack of challenge pointed to the politics: “Curiously, what the news programs on television decide to cover is often shaped by the candidates’ political advertisements,” he claims and explains: “If the news accounts are inconsistent with the ad, the power of the ad is diminished. When the two are consistent, the power of both is magnified,” (93). Then he discusses what should be done to challenge politics: “But news can only reframe ads if reporters question the legitimacy of their claims, point out the false inferences that they invite, and so on. Without such reframing by reporters, campaign ads have the potential to shape the visual and verbal language of news, and in recent campaigns they have become increasingly successful,” (93).

On the end, he moves to strategies political advertising uses. To do this, he provides a table to picture the scheme and numerous examples from political campaign history.

          

All his points have a great value in this debate about issues in political advertising, and so I can only encourage you to get some more details in the actual article:

http://www.aef.com/pdf/BERGER~Ch6.pdf

Reference:

Berger, Arthur Asa. “Political advertising”. Seeing is Believing: An Introduction to

Visual Communication. Rowman and Littlefield, 2011, ed.4.

<http://www.aef.com/pdf/BERGER~Ch6.pdf>