Free Shopping for Votes: How Politicians Choose Us and We Choose Them by Susan Delacourt Page A

consumerism and the media. Grafstein had served as a special adviser in the establishment of the Department of Consumer and Corporate Affairs when it was set up in 1967. He was also one of the founders of the CHUM Radio empire and in 1972 he co-founded the wildly successful upstart station CITY-TV with Moses Znaimer. Grafstein also founded The Journal of Liberal Thought in the 1960s.
    So if any Liberal understood the new media and advertising landscape of the 1970s, it was this Toronto Liberal. And for the 1974 campaign, he was chosen to be in charge of ad strategy. Grafstein, who had been watching the success of the Big Blue Machine, knew exactly what he had to do—set up a consortium of the best minds in the ad business. And because of his experience with CHUM and CITY-TV, he knew who these people were. He collected them from MacLaren and from Ronalds Reynolds, also a leading ad firm of the time. Rounding out what came to be called the Red Leaf consortium was a man named Terry O’Malley, then thirty-eight years old and already seen as one of the most creative minds at Vickers and Benson.
    A proud native of St. Catharines, Ontario, O’Malley had grown up playing hockey and spending his idle hours glued to AM radio broadcasts from Buffalo. He was mesmerized by the world that opened up to him through his table-model Addison radio—through its broadcasts, O’Malley was plugged into a consumers’ paradise where you could get Converse running shoes, Double Bubble and Bazooka gum, and Milk Duds. He didn’t know then that through those ads, he was also seeing his future.
    Through the Harvard club of Buffalo, O’Malley won a scholarship to the Ivy League university in Cambridge, where he got a degree in English literature. When he returned to Canada, he thought he had his whole future mapped out: he was going to teach at Ridley College in his hometown of St. Catharines. He even had the requisite corduroy jacket with the elbow patches, as well as the pipe.
    But a tag-along trip to a girlfriend’s interview changed his life. While she was applying for a job at the Kodak Company on Richmond Street in Toronto, O’Malley wandered into the MacLaren advertising firm next door and, without much of a sales pitch, landed a $50-a-week job for himself as a copywriter. Just twenty-four years old, he was immediately swept into the mad mad world of 1960s advertising, where his bosses downed bottles of rye before noon, a blue cigarette haze permanently hung in the air and every firm had its own in-house bar for round-the-clock socializing.
    O’Malley was neither a heavy drinker nor a smoker. A big pail of candy sat on the desk in O’Malley’s office, and visitors were invited to graze freely. He loved sports, especially hockey and baseball. He was also shy, preferring to express himself at his Underwood typewriter rather than in public speaking. He would show up for meetings with a bundle of sharpened pencils and notepaper, scribbling and free-associating slogans while the clients stated their needs. When it came time to hammering out the slogans at the typewriter, O’Malley would always come up with them in multiples of five, and number twenty-seven would always be called the “Frank Mahovlich” one.
    For his first few years in advertising, O’Malley moved around from agency to agency. But in 1964, he landed at Vickers and Benson, where he stayed for the rest of his career, dreaming up some of the ads that are emblazoned into Canadian marketing memory. Some of his favourites were the ones he did for the Dairy Bureau of Canada, casting butter as a sensuous indulgence (“Just Butter It”) and cheese as a friendly meal staple (“Show your cheddar more warmth; take it out of the fridge more often”). In the political realm, O’Malley penned the slogan “a leader must be a leader” and helped cast Trudeau to the public in the famous gunslinger pose that became one of his iconic images. The big difference between writing ads for