ABSTRACT
Political advertising allows parties and candidates to present themselves in a direct, and unfiltered way to the electorate, without intervention from critical journalists or competing politicians (Kaid & Holtz-Bacha, 1995; Kaid, 2008). This form of political communication-represented as advertising “contexts” in Figure 1.1 of Chapter 1-has witnessed an enormous rise in interest and spending from parties and politicians during the past decade. Several societal and political factors, such as declining partisanship, weakening party ties, an increasingly volatile and fragmented electorate, weakening party ideology, single-issue politics, and populism, have contributed to this rise (Kaid & Holtz-Bacha, 2006). In recent years, political advertising has developed as one of the most dominant sources of political communication, especially in the USA. The reason that political advertising has principally rooted in the USA can be found in the U.S. Constitution. Unlike many other Western democratic countries, such as France, Germany, and the UK, the number of regulations and restrictions in the USA on political advertising is limited, since political advertising is protected as a form of free speech (Kaid, 2008). Therefore, the amount of airtime politicians, parties, and pressure groups can buy is almost boundless. Although all kinds of media are used for political advertising messages, from brochures to social media, TV is certainly the most popular media form in the USA today. The first politician to use television as a medium for political campaigning was Dwight D. Eisenhower is his 1952 presidential campaign. Eisenhower’s campaign was remarkable not only because of the televised spots, but also because this campaign is generally seen as the first campaign in which methods from commercial marketing were adopted (Maarek, 2008). Kotler and Kotler (1999), however, note that political campaigning always has had a marketing orientation in the sense that candidates, to be successful, have to recognize the nature of the exchange process when they ask voters for their votes.
