Abstract
The Social Democratic Party not only ruled Sweden for most of the twentieth century but also owned one of the country’s largest advertising groups. The company, founded in 1947 as Folkreklam and later renamed Förenade ARE-Bolagen, rapidly became dominant in outdoor advertising in Sweden and remained in that position until the late 1980s. This paper expands the previous research on party-owned enterprises, a type of businesses that is rare in the Western democratic world, covering the history of ARE from its inception to its eventual merger with JCDecaux in 1997. It is shown that the owner relationship with the party was highly beneficial for the company, as it provided preferential access to adverting space and public contracts from government agencies and municipalities without formal competition. The party benefited from the control over sensitive information pretraining to strategies in political propaganda during elections and from the financial contribution of ARE.
Highlights
In Western democracies, advertising has been a central part of political campaigns for at least a hundred years, and political parties have been important customers for both advertising services and advertising space
The Swedish advertising group Förenade ARE-Bolagen (“the ARE Group”; hereafter ARE1), which operated from 1947 to 1997, was such a party-owned company
The archives of the Labour movement contain both the papers for ARE and the papers of the Swedish Social Democratic Party; the Centre for Business History holds the archives of JCDecaux; and the National Archives contain the papers of the Energy Savings Committee, a client of great economic significance for ARE from 1973 to 1982
Summary
The Social Democratic Party ruled Sweden for most of the twentieth century and owned one of the country’s largest advertising groups. The company, founded in 1947 as Folkreklam and later renamed Förenade ARE-Bolagen, rapidly became dominant in outdoor advertising in Sweden and remained in that position until the late 1980s. This paper expands the previous research on partyowned enterprises, a type of businesses that is rare in the Western democratic world, covering the history of ARE from its inception to its eventual merger with JCDecaux in 1997. It is shown that the owner relationship with the party was highly beneficial for the company, as it provided preferential access to adverting space and public contracts from government agencies and municipalities without formal competition.
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