Shaping the Political Culture:
Advocacy Advertising

Big business also stepped up its efforts to shape the assumptions underlying political discussion of economic issues. Corporations and corporate foundations supported public-television series that extolled free enterprise, including Milton Friedman's "Free to Choose" and Ben Wattenberg's "In Search of the Real America." They produced films and other educational materials for classroom use; for example, millions of secondary school students saw the "American Enterprise" film series funded by Phillips Petroleum. They endowed several dozen professorships of private enterprise at leading colleges and universities.

The most interesting and symptomatic trend, however, was the rise of advocacy advertising. Unlike conventional advertising that pushes either a product or a corporate image, advocacy advertising sells political beliefs and thus appeals to the public as citizens rather than as consumers. It clearly aims not at providing direct benefits to the sponsoring company but at procuring a political climate conducive to business as a whole. By the late 1970s a substantial number of major corporations and trade associations were spending hundreds of millions of dollars on advocacy advertising, which by one estimate took up one-third of the advertising dollars of major corporate advertisers. SmithKline Beckman regularly bought space in the print media to allow selected intellectuals to discuss important issues. Mobil Oil used its regular advertising slots to stake out its stance on innumerable topics. W. R. Grace and Company pushed tax reform; Dresser Industries opposed divestment in South Africa; and Tiffany and Company decried the decline of religion.^[31]

Perhaps most ambitious of all, Union Carbide sought not simply to make its political preferences clear but to show that the public in general agreed with it. To this end it commissioned a survey in 1979 of one thousand adult Americans by Roger Seasonwein Associates

and took out considerable advertising space to publicize the results. One such ad, which appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines, announced in boldface type, "AMERICANS REJECT NO-GROWTH FUTURE ," adding in smaller print, "see technology and business as forces for growth." Right above these claims were the supporting survey data: a vast majority of respondents had told the pollsters they wanted the economy to grow in the next five years, and solid pluralities identified technology and major corporations as helping growth but saw business and individual taxes, government spending, and government regulations as hindering it. These findings were enough for Union Carbide to jump to the conclusion that the American public shared its own prescriptions for promoting growth, which it proceeded to lay out in the remainder of the ad: less government spending and regulation, lower business taxes. To be sure, the actual survey, which Union Carbide made available on request, showed a much less wholeheartedly procapitalist public. In response to other questions not mentioned in the ad, a majority of those surveyed opposed cuts in government social welfare spending and regulation even in the name of economic growth and expressed considerable skepticism at business's need for higher profits or more incentives to invest. Nonetheless, Union Carbide's idiosyncratic presentation of the survey results effectively conveyed the sense that its views were not simply self-interested but were those of the public at large. What was good for Union Carbide was good for the American people.^[32]