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

products and writing ads for politicians, O’Malley found, was the speed and urgency around the political campaigns. They had a “finish line” and a score. The ad campaigns O’Malley wrote for products and the private sector, meanwhile, could afford to take a more leisurely route into the public psyche.
    Like many creative folks, O’Malley found it hard to describe how he came up with so many marketing home runs, but he did subject his ideas to what he called the “Teddy and Eddie test”—always imagining how his old St. Catharines buddies, Ted and Ed, would respond to the ads he was creating. The trick in advertising, as politicos were learning, was to reach the people who didn’t care about what you were selling. Keith Davey believed that O’Malley was unquestionably the most talented ad man in Canada. The two men had met at Harry Rosen’s while Davey was being fitted for one of his trademark pinstriped suits, and quickly struck up a bosom-buddy friendship, fuelled by their mutual love of baseball.
    O’Malley was the creative brain behind the Carling Red Cap beer campaign in the mid-1960s, which helped seal the position of Vickers and Benson as one of the pre-eminent ad firms in Canada. The beer had been suffering a market decline, and O’Malley came up with the idea to turn the remaining loyal patrons into populist heroes, a nation unto themselves. In essence, the man who had been helping politicians behave more like brands was infusing a brand with a political identity. Red Cap drinkers, O’Malley decided, would be a collective society of their own with a leader, an anthem and a salute.
    As O’Malley described it, “It was as though it had a life of its own. The first spot would be the launch, and would be the initial gathering of Red Cap drinkers, a speech from the president, the singing of the anthem, and the concluding salute: an extended right arm, thumb up, with the left hand over the heart… We took about half the office staff down to Maple Leaf Stadium and, through… camera trickery, made the stadium appear full. Nick Nichols, whom we had made the president, spoke from the pitcher’s mound in rousing political style.”
    The ads were an immediate hit—university students sang the song and did the salute at football games, while newspapers and magazines did long features on the ad campaign. Vickers and Benson started work on a second campaign, featuring real people and their participation in the Red Cap Nation—shades of the Tim Hortons “True Stories” ads that would come three decades later. Red Cap Nation also blazed a trail for beer-and-patriotism ads that would prove popular later in the twentieth century.
    The nation-gripping Canada–Russia hockey series in 1972 was also a Vickers and Benson production. The firm came up with the name “Team Canada” and even designed the Canadian team’s jerseys with their bold red-and-white maple leaf. Again, they were ahead of themselves. Later in the decade, hockey would also become interlaced with politics and patriotism—part of a larger fusion between democracy, commercial brands and sports.
    Vickers and Benson also won the advertising account for McDonald’s Restaurants in Canada—a task that included hiring people to play the clown-like mascot, Ronald McDonald. One day, as O’Malley was passing by the receptionist’s area of the office, he looked over at people coming and going near the elevators. Keith Davey was stepping off one elevator, while one of the Ronald McDonald actors, in full costume, was getting on another, on his way to an assignment. To O’Malley, this brief visual said everything about Vickers and Benson. “I said to myself, ‘That’s us!’” O’Malley recalled. Could there be any more vivid picture of this ad firm’s place at the nexus of consumer and political culture in Canada?
    Yet even as the politicos and the TV-commercial characters were passing each other in the corridors of the ad firms, they were still