He is professor of communications and of post-Cold War German history at Queen Mary, University of London.
[citation needed] He also holds postgraduate degrees from Cambridge University, Keble College, Oxford (where he was president of the Oxford Union debating society in 1978), and Columbia University in New York.
In the 1983 general election, he stood as the Conservative candidate in Swansea East, coming in third place, behind the Liberals and Labour incumbent Donald Anderson.
In 1995 he wrote five reports on political communication, commissioned by the then Prime Minister, John Major.
With his father, John O'Shaughnessy, he has written The Marketing Power of Emotion (Oxford University Press, 2003), about the role of emotion in marketing, and Persuasion In Advertising (Routledge, 2003), about why advertising persuades.