The 30-second campaign: even in the era of the Internet, TV ads still play an enormous role in presidential elections. Can you trust them?

• Author: Elliott, Stuart
• Position: NATIONAL

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Can a candidate be sold like a soap, soup, or soft drink? That's the goal of political advertising, which in some ways is similar to, but in others is very different from, its product-peddling counterparts.

Like all advertising, political ads are subjective, presenting a biased point of view. Just as a Ford ad is selling Fords, not other car brands, a political ad is selling a specific candidate. That can sometimes be obscured by the noble trappings in political ads, which are often filled with images of American flags, Mount Rushmore, and the White House.

"Don't expect you're going to get objective voter information" from political ads, says Christopher Malone, a political scientist at Pace University in New York. "That's definitely out of the question."

Regardless of their reliability, more Americans are going to see political ads this fall. In recent presidential elections, candidates have focused their TV commercials on "battleground" states like Ohio and Florida, pretty much ignoring the rest of the country. This year, there are more battleground states than usual--as many as 20. And both candidates, Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, are running nationwide ads.

BEYOND BUTTONS

Political advertising has been around since the mid-19th century, but it took the arrival of mass media in the 20th century to elevate its importance. Before there were large daily newspapers, national magazines, or coast-to-coast radio and TV networks, political advertising mostly consisted of buttons, banners, and posters intended to generate turnout at local candidate rallies and at polling places on Election Day.

That began to change when radio's reach became widespread, and the first national campaign commercials aired in 1928 for Republican Herbert Hoover (who won) and Democrat Al Smith. But the truly seismic shift in presidential campaigning canoe when television entered the picture in 1952.

That year, a Madison Avenue advertising executive convinced Republican candidate Dwight D. Eisenhower that the sights and sounds of TV offered the quickest, most effective way to get his message across to voters. Eisenhower was promoted in cartoon-style commercials featuring the upbeat slogan "I Like Ike" (his nickname).

Despite concerns that appearing in commercials would diminish his stature, Eisenhower was also the first presidential candidate to appear in TV ads. The short commercials, titled "Eisenhower Answers America," ran during popular series like I Love Lucy and were a huge hit. (Eisenhower's opponent, Democrat Adlai Stevenson, thought such commercials undignified and ran half-hour speeches on TV instead. In 1956, when he ran against Eisenhower again, he also appeared in TV commercials.)

Tellingly, it was at the dawn of TV campaign ads that their reputation for shading the truth began to develop. While Eisenhower was seen replying to questions from typical voters on issues like the Korean War and the cost of living, it turned out the answers had actually come before the questions. Questioners had been recruited to read the questions from scripts after Eisenhower's "answers" had been filmed, with the order reversed in the editing process.

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