INDEPTH: SPONSORSHIP SCANDAL
Cockfield, Brown: the original 'Liberal friendly' ad agency
CBC News Online | By Ira Basen | February 25, 2005
The focus of the Gomery inquiry has now shifted to those "Liberal-friendly" ad agencies that appear to have gobbled up super-sized commissions in exchange for very little work. But Groupaction, Lafleur Communication Marketing and Groupe Everest are just the latest in a string of Montreal agencies with close Liberal ties.
The first is a company that disappeared more than 20 years ago, and that few people today have ever heard of. But the Montreal firm of Cockfield, Brown was a pioneer among Canadian ad agencies in politics. It was the first "Liberal-friendly" agency in Canada. And in its heyday, the connections between the company and the party were closer than anything Alfonso Gagliano and Jean Brault of Groupaction could have ever imagined.
Formed in 1928 out of the merger of a Toronto ad agency and a Montreal firm, Cockfield, Brown was the first Canadian agency to establish its own research department, staffed with psychologists and other people from the newly emerging social sciences.
And it was this service that made the company so valuable to so many potential advertisers in the 1930s, and to the one political party, the Liberals, with the foresight to understand that discovering what voters were thinking was a good way of attracting their votes.
From the time of its emergence at the beginning of the 19th century until the early years of the 20th, mass advertising was based largely on guesswork. Advertisers didn't really know what consumers wanted. Nor had they yet figured out how to convince consumers to want something they didn't know they wanted.
But by the early 1900s in the United States, some psychologists began to argue that through an empirical study of behaviour, trained researchers could unlock the mysteries of why humans act the way they do. This new theory was called "behaviorism," and it held out the prospect there could actually be a "science" of advertising.
Many of these new theories about influencing opinion and mass persuasion were road-tested during the First World War in the U.S., and proved to be spectacularly successful. When the war ended, governments and companies were anxious to apply these new techniques to selling their products, policies and services.
Social scientists, particularly psychologists, were gobbled up by advertising firms and asked to help develop campaigns based on their understanding of human behaviour and motivation.
In Canada, both advertising and the social sciences were much slower to develop than in the U.S., but by the 1930s, Cockfield, Brown, could boast its own research department, and more university-trained professionals on its staff than any other Canadian agency. It had also begun to turn its attention to public opinion polling for political, rather than commercial ends.
Cockfield, Brown's links to the Liberal party began in 1935 when it donated $2,000 to the Liberal re-election campaign. By the end of the '30s, the firm was already grabbing a large share of Canadian government advertising, and was in an ideal position to take advantage of the extraordinary explosion in government advertising that followed the outbreak of World War Two.
Ottawa spent more than $30 million to promote the sale of Victory Bonds, and the firm's senior partner, Harry Cockfield, was chairman of the war bond drive. By the end of the war, the federal government had become the largest single advertiser in the country.
Most of that advertising was funnelled through a handful of what had now become very large agencies with political connections to the Liberal party. And none of those agencies was better connected than Cockfield, Brown.
The two key figures in cementing the relationship between the agency and the party were H.E. (Bob) Kidd and Brooke Claxton. Kidd was born in Stockholm in 1902 to British parents. He moved to Vancouver in 1921 where he worked in newspapers and advertising. In 1930, he joined the research department of Cockfield, Brown in Vancouver. Seven years later, he was transferred to the company's head office in Montreal.
In the campaign of 1940, Kidd helped an ambitious young Montreal lawyer named Brooke Claxton defeat a long-standing Conservative incumbent. Claxton was a big believer in opinion research, and over the next 15 years, the two men would introduce modern political marketing into Canadian politics, and change its face forever.
After successfully helping Claxton get elected in 1940, Kidd continued to do publicity work for the rookie MP to help build his national profile. In 1943, Claxton became parliamentary secretary to the prime minister, and was given responsibility for the Wartime Information Board, the agency charged with selling the war effort to Canadians.
The WIB hired Cockfield, Brown and others to determine what Canadians thought about the war, and more importantly, what they wanted from their government in the post-war world. The results of this publicly-funded polling was supposed to stay within the confines of the WIB, but it quickly found its way to Brooke Claxton and other members of the Liberal cabinet.
Access to these and other polls gave the Liberals a decided advantage over their political rivals. In 1944, when the party was thinking of launching a pre-election ad campaign, it commissioned Cockfield, Brown to undertake a survey to determine which of several possible slogans would best resonate with voters.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives' main ad firm was Canada's oldest, McKim Advertising, but it did not have a distinct research group during the war, and Tory campaigns were predictably lackluster.
By 1945, Cockfield, Brown had been officially designated as the Liberal party's sole national advertising agency, responsible for all campaign advertising in national campaigns. During that year's campaign, the firm loaned Bob Kidd to the Liberals, where, in addition to supervising the party's advertising and polling, he was also a key national campaign organizer. The agency continued to pay Kidd's salary during the campaign.
The agency didn't make any money doing campaign ads, but it more than compensated for its losses by winning a hefty share of government advertising afterwards. In 1949, Kidd was named secretary of the National Liberal Federation, a post he held for over a decade. He remained on Cockfield, Brown's payroll throughout that period.
Historian Reginald Whittaker has written that "Kidd's appointment signalled the growth of advertising and public relations in politics to the point where those skilled in the techniques of mass selling were gradually becoming more important than old-fashioned politicians or organizers."
In the 1950s, the close ties between the party and the agency began to weaken as other firms, notably Maclaren, and Vickers & Benson, began to establish their own Liberal connections.
The party's surprise electoral defeat at the hands of John Diefenbaker's Conservatives in 1957 permanently severed the special relationship between the Liberals and Cockfield, Brown, but neither side had any reason to complain. Cockfield, Brown had used its party connections to become one of Canada's premier advertising agencies, and the Liberals had enjoyed an extraordinary string of 22 uninterrupted years in power.
There would, of course, be many other "Liberal-friendly" ad firms in the years leading up to the current scandal, but none have been quite as friendly as Cockfield, Brown was in the 1930s and '40s.
Together, the Liberal party and its ad agency brought modern marketing to Canadian politics, but in blurring the lines between party, agency and government, they may have set the stage for what is currently unfolding in Montreal and Ottawa.
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Gilles Duceppe's response (RealVideo runs 5:59)
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