“Television provided the stimulus, but personal reaction was the real content of the spot.”
— Joseph Napolitan, The Election Game and How to Win It
The TV spot Napolitan was writing about is the Muskie heartbeat ad from the 1968 campaign. The visual was a wobbling line and a beeping heart monitor. The voice-over asked:
“Muskie. Agnew. Who is your choice to be a heartbeat away from the presidency?"
And that was the entire spot.
You’ll notice, it contains no claim about Muskie or Agnew, nor does it contain statistics or arguments in favour or against the candidates.
And yet every voter who saw it understood what it was saying — and many of them concluded that Agnew, not Muskie, was the unfit choice.
What’s fascinating (to me, at least), is that the spot didn’t put that conclusion into the viewer’s head. It pulled that conclusion from the viewers mind.
That may seem counter-intuitive on first blush, but it makes so much sense if we are already familiar with Walter Lippman’s Public Opinion, and his view that we all have pictures in our heads, and our job is to draw from those pictures. And it’s a theme Joseph Napolitan turns to in his book.
The spot pulled the trigger.
We see this same mechanism at play in the more famous Daisy ad from 1964, where the closing line was Lyndon Johnson saying “we must either love each other or we must die” — something no reasonable person could disagree with. And yet every voter understood the ad was about Goldwater, and that it was saying he would get them killed. The fear was already there, sitting in every American adult’s head since the Cuban Missile Crisis two years earlier.
And the practitioner’s job is to choose stimuli that create this reaction.
Napolitan calls this the difference between received and perceived media. The spot doesn’t deliver a message to a passive listener. The listener completes the spot from inside their own head. The medium is merely the catalyst. The reaction is the content.
This sounds like a theory of political advertising. It is. But it’s also a theory of all communication, and one that we ought to bring to our work every day if we are in the business of communicating with the public.