Madison Avenue Takes the Left Bank : How American-Style Commercials Help Mitterrand Win

What do Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne, Woody Allen, Woolite and the Marlboro Man have to do with the political success of French President Francois Mitterrand?

The question is at the heart of an emerging debate here about: the powerful chemistry between politics and television; the impact of American-style media and advertising campaigns on choosing a President, and government constraints on television’s freedom to shape election coverage.

For Americans frustrated by having to evaluate their candidates through clips of 15 or 30 seconds, the campaign and election night on French television often appear to be an extraordinary exercise in both political theater and democracy with candidates enduring bare-knuckles public grilling of a kind American candidates rarely have to face.

The political debate here is raucous, occasionally nasty, full of pomp and posturing, the apotheosis of a country that reveres the spoken word and reserves for politics the kind of passions other countries save for baseball, soccer or boxing.

On election night, all the major party leaders and lieutenants make live TV appearances, interpreting the results of the vote, putting their self-interested spin on the outcome. And for a few hours, the small screen reduces the politics of a nation of 54 million people to the more manageable size of a town meeting.

But what is new and controversial today is an Americanization of both French television and French politics. On French television screens, American nighttime soaps like “Dallas” and “Dynasty” hold sway along with a Gallic “Wheel of Fortune.” At 8 a.m. French news hounds tune in to Dan Rather with the “CBS Evening News,” replayed here with subtitles.

Likewise, the presidential election campaign that dominated France this spring was filled with Hollywood-style media events, photo opportunities and candidate images and strategies carefully honed and polished by Washington-style media advisers.

Enter Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne.

Where they meet Francois Mitterrand is on a quiet riverbank leading out of Paris, in an unusual steel and glass dream factory that might be described as Hollywood on the Seine.

The building itself was once a riverside steel factory designed by Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, using the same airy latticework as his Eiffel Tower. But today the factory has been converted into the headquarters of France’s hottest advertising agency, Roux, Seguela, Cayzac & Goudard.

The agency built its reputation on its talent for coating ordinary consumer products, such as Woolite or Citroen cars, with personalized, Hollywood-style “star” images. Using ingenious and often zany visuals, the agency tries to bring trademarks to life, give them style and character, making each as unique and enduring as a Marilyn Monroe, John Wayne or a Woody Allen.

The approach, which draws inspiration more from Hollywood than from Madison Avenue, has helped make French ads some of the most exciting in Europe and surely some of the most exciting viewing on French television. Zapping has indeed come to France, not to buzz out ads but to buzz them in.

Since futurist visuals are his agency’s calling card, it seems altogether fitting to find Jacques Seguela, the agency’s star image-maker, sitting in his office under a striking blue mural depicting Eiffel’s Tower. But Seguela’s version is a space-age missile soaring through the heavens, no doubt to remind clients present and potential that this agency launches campaigns that fly to stardom.

If Mitterrand goes down in history as the man who changed the face of French politics, Seguela will go down in history as the man who changed the face of Francois Mitterrand.

The first encounter between Mitterrand and Seguela is already considered a landmark event in the evolution of French politics. The intellectual Mitterrand, aloof, literary, suspicious of anything smelling of commercial, lunches with Seguela the ad man, brash, brilliant, the author of a brassy book entitled “Don’t Tell My Mother I’m in Publicity, She Thinks I Play the Piano in a Brothel.”

Somehow the chemistry took, and in 1980 Seguela began advising a hesitant, media-shy Mitterrand on how to improve his image and that of Mitterrand’s Socialist Party, which had been out of power since just after World War II. A year later, his loser’s image transformed into a winning “Tranquil Force” campaign look and theme, Mitterrand was elected president of France.

And with Seguela again advising, Mitterrand last month won a second mandate in a triumphant landslide victory over Jacques Chirac, prime minister, Paris mayor and leader of the neo-Gaullist portion of France’s political right.

The campaign was vintage Seguela and what has become vintage Mitterrand. Against the ambitious, combative Chirac, Mitterrand remained the tranquil, forceful president, guiding the nation from far above the political fray. Mitterrand a Socialist? Both the name of his party and its symbol, a red rose in a clenched fist, never appeared in his campaign visuals.

“The most brilliant campaigns present a country at a critical crossroads, with the will of a man to join the ambition of his country,” Seguela explained in an interview. “John Kennedy and the New Frontier, F.D.R. and the New Deal, Ronald Reagan as the cowboy determined to recover the lost honor of his country.”

As Seguela sees it, modern presidential campaigns are similar to advertising’s “trademark wars,” if only politicians better understood that they had to define themselves as effectively as do successful products.

“If I were to coach Michael Dukakis, I’d tell him to wake up every morning and repeat a hundred times: ‘I am the President, I am the President, I am the President’. . . .

“In a similar way, George Bush has not convincingly declared loud and strong he wants to be President. He has remained in the mold of vice president. He has failed to affirm his destiny.”

Significantly, Ronald Reagan strongly influenced the Mitterrand campaign in one key respect: the use of television. Like Reagan, Mitterrand confined his television appearances to a minimum, following Seguela’s maxim: “appear rarely but appear well.”

Jean-Michel Goudard, Seguela’s partner and the media consultant to the rival Chirac campaign now believes Chirac was overexposed on French television.

“Ronald Reagan is said to believe that any appearance of a President on television pollutes his image, unless he is there to carry forth a symbol that serves him,” Goudard said. “That makes perfect sense.”

Seguela brushes aside suggestions that the persuasive selling powers of advertising should be kept out of politics, citing Reagan as evidence.

“Ronald Reagan is the man who understands best how to use the power of communication for the good of his country.” Seguela said. “Today a president should above all be an actor, he must be a loudspeaker for the national conscience.”

Former French TV anchor Christine Ockrent is one of the media elite in this country deeply troubled by how the professional image makers, the government and the new private ownership of television can curtail balanced news coverage of presidential elections.

In her book-length essay “Duel,” Ockrent sets out what she calls “the ambiguous and incestuous relations” here between television and government, relations that ought to make Dan Rather, Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw sigh with relief.

Ockrent herself started in television with CBS’ “60 Minutes,” then in the early 1980s she became France’s most popular anchor of the evening news. Last year she became deputy director of the newly privatized TFI, one of France’s three original government-controlled channels and now one of six national networks.

Trained at “60 Minutes,” groomed in the public service tradition of French television, Ockrent now worries that yesterday’s interference by French political powers will become tomorrow’s interference by media barons out for quick profits.

Shows like “L’Heure de Verite,” the Hour of Truth, where candidates got grilled by top journalists live for nearly 90 minutes, may fall victim to poor ratings and the demands for profit, Ockrent said in an interview. In France, as in America, she’s worried about that familiar axiom of commercial television: Prime time is money.

And while the last eight years have brought French television a degree of freedom from government interference, television executives here still have to answer to a politically appointed governing board.

“The board ruled, for instance that we did not have the right to show past film clips of the various candidates,” Ockrent said. “Imagine it, television archives represent the visual political history of this country and we are not allowed to show them, because they might not show this or that candidate in the most favorable light.”

What face-to-face TV political debates do, she worries, is reduce the very important choice of a president, with all the attendant issues at stake, down to a contest of who masters television the best--not a favorable trait for the advancement of democracy.

“In the televised duel, the more one appears candidate, the less one appears president,” she writes. “To be president is to hold and exercise sovereign power: in that our imagination probably remains more monarchical than democratic.”