 One note is Greg Nenoto, who is the partner and chief creative officer at Deutsche New York, could not be with us here today due to a last-minute situation in New York, but we have representing Deutsch Jamie Maltas, who I was told is natively digital, so I'm very intrigued by that, but I know you're a key part of the interactive division at Deutsche, an advertising firm that has been associated and represented clients such as Microsoft and PNC and Unilever and I know Volkswagen and many others. We also have with us Michael Hughes, who is the president of the Martin Agency. Mike has been hailed by Adweek as one of the nine best creative directors in America. His agency is one of the best creative agencies in the world, according to Adweek and AdAge and many others. His clients, his firm's clients, include Geico, Comcast and Walmart, and I'm sure none of us have seen any Geico ads recently. So it's terrific work. I want to, before starting the conversation, play an ad or two if we're ready, John, that are quite different from the others we've seen today. Hello, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC. We've got a little network going here and it was very easy to We speak each other's language. We share our internet connection and all sorts of things we do together. Who, now, who's this, now, what's? Oh, this is that new digital camera from Japan. It just came out. You speak her language? Oh, yeah, absolutely. Everything just kind of works with a Mac. Do we have one more? Hello, I'm a Mac and I'm a PC and I feel inadequate. PC's get viruses. We can't do as much out of the box. Mac, why don't you say something positive about PC? Okay, easy. PC, you are a wizard with numbers and you dress like a gentleman. PC? Well, Mac, I guess you are a little better at creative stuff. Thank you. Even though it's completely juvenile and waste of time. Maybe you should come in twice a week. So the reason I chose to show those, and this is on me, was to dispel a little bit the idea that there is no such thing as negative advertising in the business realm as opposed to the political realm. Because obviously those are that campaign that many of you, most of you will have been familiar with, was a pretty edgy, comparative, negative take. But again, it feels very different from all of the political ads that we've seen here today. So, Mike, if you could just get us going by talking about the extent to which you feel there are such negative advertising exists when one business takes on another. And why is it that perhaps we see a lot less of it than we do in the political sphere? Do we see less of it than we use in the past? I admit I don't have a historical take there. What I think happens is in our business we tend to say that what we do is we build sales overnight in brand over time. And so we care about both of those things, building the overnight sales and building the long-term brand. And so when you come away from those Apple and Mac edge, you kind of like Apple. You're kind of like the Mac. And then he might be pretty tough. The commercials themselves might be pretty tough on their competition. But you come away liking them. Pepsi often is taken on Coke over the years, but they do it tugging and cheek, and you come away liking them. I think the difference is political advertising is rarely built to build a brand over time. It for that one day of the primary vote and that one day of the election. And then everybody's on their own again. And so you come away thinking, well, this helps me with my choice because I know I don't want to vote for that flip flopper or that person who took that stand. And it makes that immediate connection. But after a while you don't feel as good about people who are doing it. So we don't feel as good about our politicians as we do about Apple. We don't feel as good about our politicians as we do about Pepsi. And I think that's an inevitable result of going for the one time sale at any cost. And Jane Meyer's wonderful New Yorker article, she quotes Carter Eske was saying, if you're in this business, you have to figure out if I don't win this election, I die. Well, all these things, they rev up the emotion like it's Armageddon if you vote for the wrong person. And they go for that one day vote, as opposed to building a long term meaningful brand. I think the exception in the last 30 years was Reagan's Morning in America. I think that actually helped his long term brand because it was pretty positive. On the Coke Pepsi example that we provocatively just threw in the headline for this segment, I am thinking as you were as you were looting to it, I was thinking the Super Bowl ads where the Pepsi ad I think was for Pepsi Max where they show the Coke distributor trying to sneak a Pepsi in the store and all of the cans come down. Or I think this year's iteration, the Coke guy wins some sweepstakes and all the Pepsi people come out and he's sort of mortified. So do you have to have, is there some kind of unwritten rule or maybe it's even written somewhere in your handbooks that there has to be humor if you're going to go negative? Your point about the long term branding is really important. A negative advertising for a politician can just bring down their negatives. And that's fine. And that's why we see the trend for negative political advertising to go to those third party groups, non attributed, not to the campaigners. For us, when we've got to defend a brand, we want a brand to stay likable. And it's very rarely a binary choice. So we talk about Coke versus Pepsi, but I'm just as likely to go buy Gatorade or to buy orange juice. And it's not a forced choice that an election is. And because of that, we've got a different need to keep you liking the brand and keep you liking the ad. And I think humor is one of the tools that we use to get some bite, you know, usually it's satire, it gets a message across, but it keeps the brand likable. You don't want it to blow back on you. It's a lot of we talked a lot about blowback in the earlier panel. And blowback is one of the big reasons that brands don't go negative more often. We do do it, but we use it as a much more controlled technique. And it's a lot through inference. So I think of the Southwest ads that take on the big airline industries, but never mention a Delta never mentioned American Airlines, fake airline names. There's Skylon, I think, is he had the charges for bags, like they don't even want to mention one of the Delta or American to avoid that binary choice. It's to just make the point and leave the takeaway about your brand, but not necessarily always to have the negativity associated with it. Well, in one of the earlier discussions, Ken Goldstein made the point that this is not in the case of this cycle, but historically, primary fights were more civil, particularly when you had five or six candidates, maybe for the reason that you alluded to. He mentioned as an example, 2004, when Gephart and Howard Dean, then in Iowa, did a pretty good job of destroying each other to the benefit of John Edwards and John Kerry. So I guess that's part of the dynamic that you're talking about. But are there examples of this is to both of you, of other negative campaigns or comparative campaigns in the commercial space that, you know, might provide good lessons and models for political candidates? There's a famous case back in the 1950s when people were getting into pressure cooking and slow, slow cooking through pressure cookers. And there was a case where one or two of the pressure cookers blew up. And the maker of that pressure cooker ran a full page ad the paper said, will not blow up. And nobody bought a pressure cooker for five years because they hadn't even heard that, you know, this one or two cases. So we can come back and bite you, we can come back and bite you. But I, it's like, it's like airlines don't advertise about the fact that there were no crashes last night, which is an astonishing feat, but it's not one that the reason they don't do that is God forbid they should crash the next week, the next month, that that would be thrown in and I think there's a lot of keeping your powder dry for brands that rather than risk the gotcha back and forth, they will choose not to advertise. I think what what's happening more and more is that it's light comparison. So political advertising feels like it's gone to the extreme, super negative, super quick. For brand advertising, I'm intrigued watching premium car brands. So the Audi and BMWs and in the rise of Audi, Audi is taking on BMW and trying to deposition them as a premium choice, but doing so through humor, doing so through promoting their brand, not by going all the way negative, not by saying that is a bad car, just our car is better now. And I think that kind of argument works better in the commercial arena than it would in the in the presidential arena. We are amazed in our as we watch some of the all state and state foreign commercials that take on Geico these days, because it was just unbelievable that those huge companies would take on little Geico 10 years ago by our client. And so when yes, so so when they do that, we don't try to respond. We we think I can't believe we're in this same commercial with these people. And they sometimes call us Geico and they sometimes call us the 15 minute company or something like that. And I think I think that has actually helped raise the level of humanity in that whole category. I think the whole category where they used to tell you you have to buy this insurance, if you love your children. And now it's not get the one that makes the most sense financially. And don't make it so heavy. And do you do you find that you often have to talk clients out of mixing it up more? Do they come to you sometimes saying, you know, we can't believe that the this other fast food chain is charging, you know, 25 cents more for their burger, let's go after them and you have to talk them out of it or do people are people are they averse to it and on the contrary, you have to push them into some comparison. Well, clients love their brands, you know, and we love their brands for them. So often they believe fervently that they have the better product or the better brand. So often they'll want to draw out that distinction and make that argument. I think the decision calculus for us is what will most effectively sell your product and sell your brand. And to Mike's earlier point, sell it for the long term, not just the short term. There's always a cheap quick get that might get people in store get them to buy your product. But does that sustain a vision for the product that gets you to buy it the second time the third time. The other thing that I think is really important in terms of differences between political advertising and commercial is the timeframe. One of the things that is an ad guy in the commercial world, I've been blown away this cycle more than most is the speed of response and the speed of TV advertising. It feels like there's the rise of this new insta ad where literally 30 minutes or 45 minutes after a debate ends, I'm watching on YouTube and ad cut by the campaign, either rebutting or promoting something negative that was set. And that speed to market belies what could happen on the commercial side, just the layers of approval. How long would that cycle be in the real world that you operate in? Chairman of a company gets really angry at their competitors. I want an ad that says this and this. But by the time it comes back to us and goes back through their lawyers, 20 people said, you're not going to do that. You're not going to do that. And it comes back because we can do things very quickly. But not many big corporations are built to handle them quickly. They can't go through. His agency or mine could do an ad for you overnight. But you couldn't get it approved. I mean, I've done ads in as little as 10 days. You know, I've done digital ads in a day, but the approval cycle often dwarfs the amount of time it takes you to make the ad is the amount of time it takes you to get approved. And I think that's the difference. Political campaigns by their nature have a boss. And when the boss says go, you can go. That's often not true of the world of brands and the world of commercial advertising. And we're more concerned about being taken to court for not saying something to it's an important distinction. We don't have the same First Amendment protections to say anything. You know, when you're representing a brand and a public company or even a private company, you've got a much greater challenge to meet the fair standard is what you're saying true. You know, does defy FTC rules? And I think that that level of scrutiny means that the comparisons we make are often more valid or at least more clear. Yes, there was I think it was there was some question earlier about the whether they're checks and balances and and remedies and the political sphere and there are I mean libel laws applied. But the the bar and the burden of proof is quite different when you're talking about public figures. And also there was a conversation earlier about the the extent to which local broadcasters assert their power to say you know we don't think this this flies factually and they often don't want to get in that business for obvious reasons. So it's it's true. I I was wondering about you know we talked a lot about the phenomenon of independent groups in this cycle. It's super PACs that are empowered by Citizens United. You know, eight years ago it was the five twenty sevens. There always seems to have been these independent unaffiliated groups that can go a lot nastier for reasons that you've also alluded to that there's some blowback effect to the candidate or the brand itself if it's involved in the negative messaging. And I suppose we don't really have anything akin to that unaffiliated third party that can go nuclear in the commercial space. But I'm wondering if that might be changing or might change with with the you know you Jamie are natively digital. So are there kind of guerrilla campaigns that speak if ever there wasn't. Are there are there are there are there sort of guerrilla campaigns that brands can engage in by not with the spot that you see in the Super Bowl but something that's happening online that's very targeted that might begin to resemble this notion the dynamic of having an arms length with a group that can get more negative. Yeah we talk often about branded and unbranded campaigns. So often a company will launch an unbranded to campaign to either seed or unseen a point of view or perspective. The pharma world does it a lot. So pharmaceutical drug might want you to you know start to take interest in a bladder disorder and that might be an unbranded ad which allows them a little more latitude in what they could say about bladder disorder and then that might be followed by a branded advertisement for their bladder solution having paved the way with an unbranded. So I think there's definitely an analog in our commercial world for branded and unbranded. In terms of attack I don't know that I think there's a perfect analog but certainly in the Southwest example and many others we will take on a mythical company or a theoretical company and it's lost on no one who were attacking. I think those are the two analogs for me. I think there's a sensitivity that people feel in corporations that for example our Walmart client is always very sensitive to the fact that they can't feel feel like bullies. They can't be out there saying we're doing this sustainability thing. What they have their customers say is the customer say look if all 200 million Walmart shoppers if we all do this it'll make a difference and the customers get credit for it because some a big company like Walmart has to worry about the whole perception and there aren't other people who are going to come to Walmart's rescue for that kind of thing when it's unfairly charged with something. I think the notion of bullies is really important analog different from the advertising world. You know Ken talked a bunch about there being rough parity between Republicans and Democrats. Most cycles would spend. That's not true of the commercial world and that's certainly not true in many of our categories. There's a lead competitor, there's a number two and often there's a great distance between those top one or two competitors and everybody else so we don't have that same burden of ask and answer or ask and response and I think that changes very often as the leader what you're willing to say. You know from some of the earlier examples often the leader doesn't want to respond to the guy that's at five percent even if he makes a negative ad and often you know on the other side I've done the challenger ads and been thrilled when someone responds. You know many years ago we did some printer work that was meant to provoke HP that was the dominant leader and printer and when HP responded to our one percent share player with their 80 plus percent share it was a win. They were talking about our printers and getting reporters and tech reporters to consider buying that printer at least was the printer better. So that's one of the differences is that there's not real parity it's what you can afford to spend and that's driven very often by market share. I think one of the big difference at Sid Meyers and his partners out there one of the reasons they're heroes to everyone in their business is not just what they did with the days he had but their agency created a kind of humanity for advertising. That Volkswagen ad. That Volkswagen ad and his agency's Volkswagen ad in the Super Bowl last year with the kid is Darth Vader. There is still that humanity that great humanity that our clients want to own and the politicians you know it is a tough business and they do have to be thick skin. Have you ever done political ads? Either one of you? I have not. I did back in the 70s a long time ago. We got a call from a billionaire guy who's in the 150 top 150 people in the Forbes billionaire list a couple of months ago asking us I like your guy go ads I want to go after Barack Obama would you guys do this? And it took my partner and me a couple of minutes to say no we're not going to do that. And it's you know when like so I sit out there and I hear two and a half billion dollars I said why don't I do that? And I said but it's not the kind of business that you'd feel good about in the morning. You know and is that the reason or is it just that if you're in one business it's hard to get into the other because you might want to offend your your corporate clients. Both of us have the same parent company and the parent company doesn't let us do political advertising. Which is good. Customers you're talking about so our clients presumably occupy a broad range of political points of view and the last thing they want is their agency you know to represent only one point of view and then all of a sudden the commercial world you've limited your client set to those conservative companies or to those progressive companies. So it's also a bad business I think as much as we we encourage our people to work on their own outside of the agency political campaigns and even give them some time off but we don't dictate what their policy what their politics should be. I asked earlier if political you know if you had if you could point to political I'm sorry commercial ad campaigns that politicians can learn from. When you look at political advertising and and we've seen a lot today dating back to those incredibly painful Eisenhower ads. Do you see do you pick up ideas or transit that might translate or are they just so binary and so black and white and so vicious that you just kind of laugh at them. I definitely think how they're using some of that quick turn some of that instant response some of that micro targeting I think there's a bit of a feedback loop between the commercial side and the political side. You know I'm struck this cycle by the lack though of branding so commercial advertising is so much about building a brand over time. And when I look at Obama's success in winning that election to me part of what he did was build such a strong brand all the way through the primaries. You know the Democratic Convention served to really relaunch that brand to me it carried him through election and this cycle I don't see any kind of consistency from any of these candidates and how they want to show up and I think that's an analog from our world that feels to me like sorely missing in the political world. It's very today's fight you know today's need versus that kind of longer term view. I'm not a fan of around Paul but I do think his advertising has been the best because he has a consistency about him which I personally think is crazy but to the point where he's on point and his messages are on point and I think it's you can understand why so many people find that attractive and it's an interesting question. There's a believability I mean there's a reason that we don't encourage brands to change their campaign every six months or every year and there's a reason that Tony the Tiger is still Tony the Tiger that we build you know what a logo looks like and what even commercials look like and we change them very carefully and relatively slowly because that familiarity is what builds favorability and I think that familiarity is not happening for some of these political candidates in part because they keep changing their message and I think you're dead right Ron Paul has been super consistent I feel like I know what I'm gonna see in his ads and I know what statements even in the debates I know when he's gonna hop up you know and lose his cool and I think that that really works to tell those voters that are gonna vote for him what they should vote for him based on and I think some of the others and this is I think a really interesting thing the rise of social media means they don't get to say one thing in Kansas and another in Florida and a different thing in Iowa and I think that's been true in our commercial world for a long time because most of the brands are national it feels relatively new even to presidential politics that that stuff is so easily dispersed the Iowa Pander hurts you in Florida a month later right it's funny in the last debate I don't know if you saw it Ron Paul I think it was debate number 20 when CNN the moderator asked each candidate to define to define themselves with one word the one word Ron Paul chose was consistent so it's interesting to hear you all pros in the business of branding seen that in his messaging too is there one commercial Michael that that you wish you had done that you didn't I mean when you what's in the in the political not in the political world necessarily in the commercial space one campaign one commercial that you admire the most that you say I wish I had done that well the one that's on everybody's mind these days or the other two were the big Apple commercials that think different wouldn't it be nice political candidate could could find something that inspiring and and so I think that I think everybody in our industry loves that and I think you know going back a number of years the people who who did bear commercial for Reagan and the morning in America were the same people who did the bottles and James commercials and G.E. brings new good things to life they were some of the really professional top professional people in our industry and it shows that maybe people should get maybe agencies like ours should be doing this but when it's unregulated as it is and the encouragement to exaggerate and take things out of contacts it's just too uncomfortable for us whatever happened to wine coolers I remember those ads those guys on the floor Jamie is there something now we'd leave them the liquor so that it sells the liquor on Tuesday the business has changed you know I was struck you know I love the days yet I'm a political junkie and it was such a transcendent moment in political advertising where it all changed in an instant and I was struck watching it for the first time in a while the similarity of that daisy ad in story to 1984 and just that air wants a fundamentally different message a message that again in the Apple ad but just the depth of being able to run a commercial to be re-air I think is something that's not being thought about enough particularly in this cycle so much of this stuff is thought of as what are we going to put out there versus what is the response that what we put out there is going to draw and then what conversation will that response start and I think the politicians have started to wake up to that game a little bit it feels like there's a there's more than ever before a commercial made for the nine o'clock hour on cable news but I think that there's still more need for that kind of response-based advertising instead of stimulus-based you know don't tell me what you want to tell me let me let me draw my own conclusions still feels very hitting on the head for me I think a takeaway from your conversation for me that I hadn't thought about was the absence of branding that we're seeing in this cycle of advertising in the primary season where it's quick reaction let's bring down the latest candidate who might have seen a surge in the polls and I suppose the candidate that eventually gets the nomination is might hope that there might be a moment there between that moment and the conventions and the general election season to engage in that positive branding and it'll be interesting to watch that going forward but that that insight that you provided is is really helpful and I you have something to say Jamie then I do want to open it up to I think it's worth saying we built in some systemic branding vehicles so very consciously after the election when it's all over we do a dramatic inauguration and we do an dramatic run-up in the when you say we you know we the country the country and the reason we do that is to make the president the president to make the president above this all and above the day to day politics so I think branding is important for the candidates but I think it's equally important that then we take that step back and make them above that ugly mess of politics and it feels like this is going to be an uglier year maybe than ever before maybe not according to Ken but interesting to think about the deliberate choice to rebrand the president as the president not as the candidate we said all those mean things about although increasingly that's that I would argue that's happening less right the campaign never seems to end the legitimacy of the president is questioned by the opposition more so than the past but but I I I get what you're we're saying about the serious part of this is that now candidates for their whole life have to be careful that they're always against the other side and um... they don't want anything coming back at them uh... my agency did the commercial with uh... newt gingrich and Nancy Pelosi that gingrich now says was the biggest mistake of his life and what was our goal at that time was we called it the we campaign because we wanted all americans against global warming and explain what that ad was for uh... Al Gore started the alliance for climate protection right and uh... he he put together a board that was half republican and half democrat and we competed for the business and we won and the whole idea of the campaign was that uh... we were going to bring both sides together on this there was some naivety on our part it is impossible to separate politics from those things it's impossible to separate politics from Al Gore in most people's minds so it's may romney son you a thank you note let's open it up uh... here in the front el milik and a media what do you know as far as the market research the scientific study that's done in your commercial world is compared with the political world and also uh... what influences there from other nations other cultures as far as what works with their advertising and how that has affected or not affected uh... american i guess particularly political advertising well i think uh... one thing that's you know one thing that's happened the international influences on american advertising i think we're getting more visual in their storytelling less based on uh... articulated positions and for better and for worse sometimes uh... i think in politics it is uh... we know from a lot of research that consumers are really overwhelmed by choice if they have all this choices how do i narrow it down so i can make a decision so i don't just keep putting the decision putting it off day after day after day and the negative things will work better i would be hard pressed if i was doing a political campaign not to tell the person to run the negative ads because i think that will get them elected faster because it will help eliminate the competition in that choice procedure to answer the second part of your question uh... the range of research we do for a particular client or for a particular campaign varies greatly but often it's pretty in-depth focus grouping so literally getting a group of the representative target in a room share either work in progress or final ads gauge reaction gauge what's good what's bad what's working what's not working revise those ads maybe go back to those focus groups or even do you know more of a quantitative testing so literally put it in front of hundreds and at times thousands of people and understand what works at what doesn't that's some clients another kind of client will look at an ad look at an idea say make me that uh... and wanted on air in a week or two so it really is a big range i think uh... the differences it feels like the political world shifts a little more quickly your perception of brands is pretty ingrained and it will shift but it won't shift overnight so we've got a little bit of a longer timeline on which to do that research to put a campaign in market uh... for politicians you know when i look at the world that rick santorum is advertising into this week versus four weeks ago my god you know the ad campaign would would have been cut you know four different times in the four weeks based on who we think he is that moment and who he needs to project that he's going to be going forward to win an election you know you didn't really have to explain how the process works because we've all watched madman we know how it works you know don draper calls a couple of people into his office and uh... there's an ad next morning have you seen a surge in applications for people want to work in your firms because of madmen the glamorous life that y'all lead i'm i'm kidding not not just not just the drinking uh... seems like a lot of fun uh... in the back there in the blue shirt mark brotsky retired physicists uh... this seems to be one analog in the commercial world to the rapid response and that's the superbowl ads i mean the minute the superbowl is at is over there's a lot of press response to those ads how's that changing commercial advertising and i know it is superbowl ads getting better or worse as a result i won't say better or worse but the thing i would tell you is superbowl advertising now starts three weeks before the superbowl not the minute the superbowl ends you know literally you know vw a year ago we released the fourth spot about ten days before and it had ten million hits viewers on youtube before the superbowl had ever started uh... a good percentage of the country had seen it and decided they liked it and the usa today poll that's one of the big ones that decide superbowl success was in many ways influenced by that social media vote of what was good before so i do think that there's the superbowl is an unusual moment of scrutiny for advertising we don't care we don't ask about advertising for the most part we try and we tell ourselves it doesn't affect us and we don't pay attention the superbowl is the moment where we tune in and watch the ads so there's become a great game to see whose ads will be effective so it does change that way in terms of preparation just the sheer spend involved in a superbowl spot drives a long cycle of what is the right piece of creative that we should put out there there's also not that many moments on network television anymore where you can get an audience of a billion people you know there's only one or two the whole year so it's a moment to break new news to break a new to campaign to launch a new product so it does in general requires way more preparation than a normal spot in the front here hi i'm greg shuckman and uh... just want to thank uh... the foundation this is fantastic for for all of us political advertising junkies the one thing i was trying to think about when when you're talking about rockham sockham robots with products is uh... bowing and lockheed in some of the contracts that were happening here in town recently uh... but you're right there's very few where they're willing to go head to head uh... because of the damage of the blowback that'll come from from something like that what i what i was curious about was if you apply this to a different industry okay i mean higher education and one of the things that we're facing is uh... for profits which is getting a lot headway because of the the advertising that they're able to spend and because it's sort of overwhelms probably not unlike what what state farm and all state are about geico uh... just the amount of money that's being thrown out to advertise does that change perception and how do you avoid getting blowback as a sector because i think that's where some of the some of the brands tried to play is is okay we can't do it head-to-head but if i can do it as a sector if i can do it for a trade group or or an issue advocacy group that's created as a coalition so it's just one if you talk about that i have a wife who's a teacher so i have to be very careful when talking about education you know i think the sector it's a really interesting dynamic private first public i think that there is enough money in the education field whether it's on the union side supporting public workers or stuff that there's the ability to land a perception if if the discussion was can we do advertising can we change perception of the business i certainly think that's something that's possible i also think that you know we're talking about advertising but we're in the business of marketing and that transcends advertising in the paid messages we put out there you know through social media through the paid media there's many ways to land your message and i think that there's an opportunity for education to get out in front and tell their story a little bit i think what's happened is educators and i'm a big fan of teachers lost control of the narrative and when you lose control of the narrative and you're forced to answer somebody else's narrative whatever the field is you're in trouble because then you're left to a but why are you getting paid so much why aren't you measuring instead of here's how successful we are how can we improve it so i think part of it is just grabbing control of that narrative and i would tell you advertising is only one of the ways to do that uh... i appreciate the the reference to have the uh... boing lockheed martin because with that is a peculiar type of of uh... campaign that trend that sort of bridges the commercial space and the political space and that we have these fights for government contracts that do have this feeling of a zero sum winner take all and they can get quite nasty and they're conducted you know people writing the metro in washington are subjected to these ads on the metro for things they have they have no clue what the what is being referred to unless they happen to be a capitol hill staffer so it's this very strange washington phenomenon of advertising if you're in Nebraska and you turn on tv at five a.m you'll see a farm show where the uh... the farm chemicals are saying this is the one that gets nematodes and our competitor doesn't get nematodes so this is the one you ought to buy and and they're pretty competitive i mean they take each other on because there are real product differences and um... we really have to work hard to find the meaningful product differences so right behind you hi astrid doner with the germany's business daily hangless blood uh... somebody earlier said that president obama is in a difficult pretty tricky security situation right now known for mostly positive campaigns but yourself uh... you said that negative ads do work so i was wondering do you have any advice for his campaign how should he react going forward i uh... u.s. or i was asked in two thousand and eight hillary clinton brock obama and chris dodd's campaigns to work for those campaigns and so i thought about this a lot i didn't do it but i i have thought about this a lot i think if obama is in a good enough position that he can do some things that lift up america the way morning in america did for reagan i think that could help him be more effective um... once he if he wins if he knows he's going to win um... reagan was in a position where it became pretty clear he was going to win again and that kind of confidence is rare if you're as confident about that then you're gonna have to spend your money negative because you need to win and uh... and so the long-term branding of being having some uplifting commercials would be fabulous for the whole country those sides does halftime in america work? no it's a it gets added doesn't it? it really does i think it's really good to think about the benefits of incumbency when you're president obama i think we talked a bunch about the special interest groups and all the different unaffiliated groups that will get to speak this cycle and i think if i was advising president obama i would keep him totally positive i think he is the president of the united states a country coming out of a recession jobs is arguably getting better things are getting better across and i would have him tell that story and only that story and leave it for others to do the drawdown i don't think there's any reason for him to get his hands dirty with that kind of debate and i think that's some of the difficulty that we heard discussed when we were talking about the politics is that he may well do that he may be able to stay positive and that has nothing to do with what the democratic machine will be choosing to say about whoever the nominee ends up being so i do think from a branding perspective i would do the same thing to me he has started to run and will run morning in america times two this time you know he's a second term presidency you know who dealt with the tough first term some tough situations very much analogous to what reagan faced you know both as he entered office you know at the two-year mark and now as the economy looks like it's turning around it really may be a replay of that campaign and i think he's got a strong brand with the hope and change that he ran on to pick back up and really focus in on it will be interesting to see what he does uh... as the race titans very much like we talked about before he may have to go negative and i think that does have an impact on your competitor but the reason we don't do it in commercial advertising is it has an impact on you that blowback is unavoidable the thing that's working in the favorite his favorite now is that as someone said earlier it's that sliver of voters who don't already know what they're going to do and they can be influenced by positive advertising too is a temptation to preach to the choir and the choir is pissed off at that other side and so you want to go after that other side and um... there's that strong internal feeling of that and uh... but if you're only going after that sliver of voters who will make the difference uh... it's possible that you could get go along with positive advertising some good pro bono advice it's interesting though the extent to which candidates are going to be able i think going forward to retain this arms-length relationship with their unaffiliated supporters increasingly we're seeing we've seen this already in this cycle you know newt gingrich will demand of admit romney you know tell your people to stop it and to the point where admit romney said well if there's anything in there that's an accurate uh... yes i should i will but i'm not so sure and i haven't seen the ads of course he went on to say what was in the ads but but uh... you know this this sort of uh... narrative it's not quite a legal fiction but this narrative fiction that well i can't control what my sport we've seen it in past election cycles too it would be it would be nice as as you suggest jimmy if the candidate can pretend that there's no blowback from any of the independent expenditures i just it'll be really an interesting thing to look to see going forward if that actually proves to be the case it feels to me like it hurts overall candidates authenticity so we asked these guys to be real and be honest with us and we asked them to pretend that their biggest donor their whole careers you know by the time they get to be running for the presidency these guys have backed them in ten cycles twenty years and we asked him to pretend they have no idea what that person is doing and they would never stoop to talking to them so i think we've enshrined in law this really weird behavior that we asked for our most senior candidates and then they are left to play the part you know that legally that he cannot turn and say adelson turn that ad off you know that would that would violate the law so it's a really weird structure for their brands versus what the law asks them to do let's take one more question here in the front uh... chuck schroeder former doiled ain't burned back copywriter and now a senior creative people uh... one of the things that that i was really kind of glad to hear you guys say uh... and meaning no offense if uh... mike the uh... research guy is uh... still here well a whatever uh... he made a point that uh... advertising wouldn't really affect the outcome of an election uh... to frame that you know from our perspective from where we come from the research guys were always people came into a meeting with reams of information they're always very smart guys and a creative person would take one page out of that massive stack of information and say i like this it would infuriate them demean them and make them feel as though all that tremendous work they put in was to not so you've just said and i want to make sure that we underscore underscore the point that good advertising persuades and that this sliver you're talking about uh... is is persuadable and uh... if you can elaborate slightly on that we think that might have worked uh... i think the challenge for obama specifically will be getting the people out to vote who voted last time because now that he is uh... attacked a lot by every part of the spectrum from liberal to conservative i think it he has to inspire people that were inspired last time to go out and vote for this different looking different sounding kind of candidate and he's no longer as unusual in the position and uh... the people on the left have taken some of the luster off of him so he needs to restore that kind of luster and that kind of uh... thing you know nothing will work better for him than a if you get some joy in people's hearts if you can go back to the inauguration speech or the speech he gave in chicago the night he won the election that's the kind of spirit that will drive people out again i also think that a lot of the positive stuff he ran in the await cycle is what got him to win the presidency i think he did an awesome job of rebutting republican attempts to make him the other and make him seem something outside or something strange or something foreign and he ran positive ads but positive ads that reinforced his family reinforced his americanist and i think that that i think tv has a way of bringing people into your home and creating a familiarity and i think his advertising helped create that familiarity with him to let his message land so i i think advertising is hugely powerful i think advertising at its best pushes you the way you're leaning it reinforces a perception that you want to see or that you think to be somewhat true that was why swiftboat veterans for truth was so deadly for kerry you felt like there was something a little wishy washy you didn't know you know he had stood before congress should we treat him as a war hero was there something suspect and they pushed on that point but it was early in the public persona and i think that's where advertising both for brands and politicians is awesome it can help cement a perception that lingers in people's minds the hardest thing to do in any advertising is if you've got to create a brand new perception or a brand new behavior but that kind of lean which is most of political advertising i think is ready made for television advertising thank you unfortunately we do need to wrap up now i'd like to thank you