Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

Today, we’re bringing you an episode of “Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins,” a new podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network. In this episode, host and marketer Seth Matlins speaks with political strategist David Axelrod, who was President Obama’s chief strategist and senior advisor. David is currently a senior political commentator for CNN and the co-host of Vox Media’s “Hacks on Tap” podcast. David sees the American brand as devalued but not beyond repair. He and Seth talk about how to fix it. Produced by Wisdomous and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Follow the podcast on Instagram / TikTok: @createordestroypod Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kara Swisher?

  Hi, everyone. From New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher. We're bringing you an episode of the new podcast from the Vox Media Podcast Network called Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins. In this episode, host and marketer Seth Matlins speaks with political strategist David Axelrod, who is President Obama's chief strategist and senior advisor. David is currently a senior political commentator for CNN and the co-host of Vox's Hacks on Tap podcast. Seth and David talk about how to fix the American brand, which David sees as having been devalued but not beyond repair. So stick around.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  What is a story that holds us together? What is the story that that that most of us share that allows us to have a sense of community rather than a sense of, you know, adjacent parts?

• 1:04Speaker 02

  I'm Seth Matlins, and welcome to Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing. It's my new show exploring how every decision a company makes, not just the marketing ones, but everyone, either contributes to value creation or destruction. And it's about how the only value that ultimately matters is how valuable your customers think you are, all of which is why marketing has to be reimagined as an organizational mindset, not just a function. Each week, I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people who are building, breaking, and reimagining how businesses grow or don't, for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Creator destroys the show that argues they've always been the

• 1:48Speaker 02

  same thing. This week, I'm thinking about the business of politics, because the parallels between political campaign strategy and business value creation aren't metaphorical. They're structural and abundant. At a fundamental level, a campaign's an enterprise where every decision, what you say and don't, who you hire, where, how, and when you show up or don't, what you Refuse to say the baby or the donor you kiss or don't either builds value with voters or destroys it. And voters, they're customers who all only get to buy what you're selling on just one day, and you need 51% of them. To unpack these parallels, I'm sitting with the legendary political strategist and consultant David Axelrod.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  He was chief strategist and senior advisor to President Barack Obama, the founding director of the University of Chicago's Institute of Politics, and he's currently a distinguished fellow at the University of Chicago, a senior political commentator for CNN, and the co-host of the Hacks on Tap podcast. Across 40 years and over 150 campaigns, David may have thought more deeply about how you move people to take action at scale than almost anyone alive.

• 3:00Kara Swisher?

  Support for this show comes from The Guardian and their new show, Stateside, where journalists Kai Wright and Carter Sherman use the entire independent reporting resources of The Guardian to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what is actually happening in the world. Join Kai and Carter three times a week as they utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has across news, international coverage, climate, culture, wellness, and more. And The Guardian's not owned by a billionaire. They fearlessly report the facts without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 3:44Kara Swisher?

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• 4:27Speaker 03

  How much more would you get done with a personal assistant in your pocket?

• 4:31Speaker 04

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• 4:46Speaker 03

  What we gain and give up when AI agents enter the picture. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Listen to new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  David, I want to, I want to start by asking you a couple of questions about brands. It's going to come at you in two parts. And specifically about what you've learned about their role in value creation and getting people to turn out and buy in that moment, right? That is a geo TV effort. First, first part of the question is, I'm going to talk and get your take about the candidate as brand, right? And how is a political strategist, do you think about this? And, and what are the steps that you take to take a candidate that maybe we don't know particularly well and turn them into something of a brand or to use George Lakoff's context, you know, frame them as

• 5:49Speaker 02

  something of a brand and turn the product that's the candidate into something more sellable than perhaps they'd be without it?

• 5:59Speaker 01

  Well, this won't make me unique, but I once was screamed at by Steve Jobs because he, at the beginning of the Obama campaign, he, after telling me that my industry was crap and so on, he asked me what our communications plan was and I started talking to him about it. Uh, and you know, he interrupted and so on. And um, I said to him, Steve, you know, selling presidents, it may be just a little different than selling computers. And he hung up on me. So I, uh, you know, I'm always reluctant to speak of candidates as brands, but there's no doubt that

• 6:41Speaker 02

  They are.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  They are. And um, you know, the process that I went through with candidates is trying to understand what their comparative advantages were um, uh, with uh, the folks who are going to decide the election. In other words, I would focus on not the people who I knew were always going to be for us or the people who are always going to be against us, but those people who were persuadable. Because you can say a hundred things about someone uh, that are all real and authentic. But uh, what are the two or three that are the most meaningful? And how do they cohere in a, in a message that um, people can grasp?

• 7:26Speaker 01

  And that's the process that um, I uh, I always applied in, in uh, in campaigns. Um, and certainly that was the case in the Obama uh, campaign.

• 7:42Speaker 02

  Who is this Obama you speak of?

• 7:45Speaker 01

  Well, you know, he, that's what everybody was asking.

• 7:47Speaker 02

  At the time, yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  At, uh, uh, back in the day. But you know, he, when Obama, he really, you have to look at his rise from 2004 through 2008. Began with his senate race. Uh, and it came in a time when the country was deeply, deeply fractured by the Iraq war. And by a sense that Washington was uh, you know, just um, At each other's throats. The parties were at each other's throats. They were gridlocked. They were very self-interested. And here comes this guy from the outside who challenges the whole gestalt of Washington,

• 8:33Speaker 01

  the whole, you know, red versus blue, who's up and who's down kind of theory of Washington. And the idea that we, you know, that we can never deal with any big problems because of it. And, um, and so the first ad, Seth, that I ever did for Barack Obama was in his campaign for the US Senate. And it was a biographical ad. And a lot of it was about things that he had done in his life. You know, first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, things he had done in public life where he took on an issue that people thought was unachievable

• 9:17Speaker 01

  and helped achieve it. All building up to him saying, and now they say we can't change Washington. Well, I'm Barack Obama. And I approved this message to say, yes, we can. And yes, we can became the sort of tagline for much of what we did.

• 9:38Speaker 01

  Moving forward. In fact, it's one of the words that's embedded in the side of the Obama Center that's opening in June. And what we were playing against was not just opponents, but against a whole political

• 9:57Speaker 01

  climate at the time, where people were deeply jaundiced about the system, about the ability to get things done. And where politicians were not trading high and were seen as sort of self-interested. Parties were seen as self-interested.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Almost seems nostalgic today.

• 10:18Speaker 01

  So yes, we can. Yes, we can was, uh, it was, it was both optimistic. And it also was about them and not just us. And what we wanted people to-

• 10:30Speaker 02

  I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say-

• 10:32Speaker 01

  People, yes. You know, in 2008, it always, I'm always reminded Hillary's slogan was-

• 10:43Speaker 01

  I'm with her. That was a tagline they used a lot and his was, yes, we can. Uh, and it was not about him. It was about them. It was about what we could do together. And there was just a yearning for someone who, who, who could, who could lead such a movement. So I always think back to that race in 2008 and, you know, we were the insurgents. We were the grassroots candidate. We were challenging what essentially was the big brand in democratic politics, Hillary Clinton, the Clintons.

• 11:19Speaker 01

  But, um, they made a series of strategic decisions, one of which was, you know, there were posters everywhere saying, I'm with her. To try and tie into the fact that she would be the first, uh, woman. We, we didn't ever reference the fact that he would be the first African American president. We figured if people were motivated by that, they would know.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  It was, it wasn't, we didn't need to remind them.

• 11:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  But, but the tagline of yes, we can.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Made it about everyone, not about him.

• 11:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  And it was very positive at a time when people were very, uh, very down and, and jaundiced about what politics was and what it could produce. And, um, so, uh, you know, that kind of, it was built on the essence of who he was and the story we told about him from the beginning. And, um, so we had a solid foundation for, for the theme.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  I want to, I want to come back to Hillary's campaign in 08 in a minute, but I want to ask you about something you said earlier, which is in building the brand and refining the message, and we're going to talk about you as a storyteller as well. You, you talked about trying to figure out what resonates with whom. Now about

• 12:45Speaker 02

  two or three years ago, when I was still at Forbes, I set out to write a piece that I never did about why the Democrats by and large suck at. Marketing, at least when compared to the other party, and they just do. One of the things that my research led me to from a bunch of people who are far more informed about it than I was is they they all agreed with the premise. What they said is it's because the Democratic tent is so big. There are so many constituent groups that you have to appeal to that figuring out what to say to every that that that pulls everybody in as opposed to what you have to say to pull in this group and this group and this group and this group, all based on identity is is a real challenge, right? The Republicans tend to have in America, obviously, a more cohesive base.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  And and so the comms challenge is a little simpler. And I'm wondering, A, if you think that's right, but B, given to the extent you do think it's right, given how many identity groups there are, how many different types of people make up the Democratic coalition? How do you figure out what's going to resonate with Johnny and Sally?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's a question of whether you think that the

• 13:56Speaker 01

  you know, whether you can assemble piece by piece

• 14:03Speaker 01

  your your base or whether you emphasize those things that talk that speak to the largest number of people. And our theory was always that we would do that. I mean, you know, we would have conversations with different constituencies, but

• 14:24Speaker 01

  as I said, we never we never emphasized the fact that he was a black candidate. That was obvious to everyone. And when we really kind of stayed away from a lot of

• 14:38Speaker 01

  sort of divisive social issues or niche issues.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Because there were some big issues that everyone shared, concerns that everyone shared. And what we were pitching and what we believed was that we should speak to the common experiences of large numbers of people who were struggling in the economy, who were opposed to the war, who were fed up with politics as as usual, rather than this sort of microtargeting that I think is a flawed way to approach.

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Campaigns.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  And, and do you think it's that way, both at a national campaign and a local campaign? And, and why?

• 15:27Speaker 01

  I mean, look, primary elections are different than general elections and, you know, they're all, there are, there are different circumstances and I'm not saying that you should not, um, you should not, uh, you know, try and appeal to groups of voters who are important in a, in a party or in a, you know, or, or generally, but you should not do that to the exclusion of a larger story. What is a story that holds us together? What is the story that, that, that most of us share, uh, that, uh, allows us to have, um, a sense of community, uh, rather than a sense of, um, you know, adjacent parts?

• 16:10Speaker 02

  Do you think, do you think that that approach is, will that approach work at a national level, moving forward in a country that, you know, as I said before, it like nostalgic for oh eight, when people were divided, like, that seems like, you know, the halcyon days of division.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 16:28Speaker 02

  As opposed to today, to how?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, one thing we're fighting Seth is we're, we are, we live in an age of social media. We live in an age of big data and, and, um, and algorithms, uh, that, um, thrive on separating us and shoving us into silos. I actually think we're reaching a point where it's possible that a candidate in 2028, for example, could actually run against all of that. And because I do think there's a, I, I think that people, we are sort of oftentimes against our wishes, even our awareness, we are being shoved into silos.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  But I also think there's a weariness with the kind of siege, uh, mentality of our politics today, the, the, the sort of constant, uh, battling that we have. And I, I do, I think, now it could just be that I am a, um, you know, un, uh, apologetic idealist about what democracy can be, but I.

• 17:39Speaker 01

  I think people also hunger for community and we've lost community. We have faux community, but we don't have real community. And I think people are, and you know, the president is sort of a human algorithm. He finds those things that divide us and he-

• 17:55Speaker 02

  Or an inhuman algorithm, sorry if my bias is showing.

• 17:58Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, it's not very subtle. But, um, but, uh, he, you know, he, his view of leadership is exactly that you, you, you find your community and you, uh, you animate them by creating, um, straw men and, and, and, and draw everybody outside the circle who's opposed to you in ways that, uh, galvanize people. Um, I think that there is, there is every election, I can tell you, I mean, this is my very, very strong feeling based on my experience. Every presidential

• 18:36Speaker 01

  election, uh, interestingly, oftentimes mayoral elections too, but every presidential election, especially when the incumbent is leaving, is about the incumbent who's leaving. And it's never that people want to replicate what they have. They always want the remedy to whatever they see or the deficiencies in the person they have. But one, one of the deficiencies that Donald Trump has that is, that is deeply felt is he is a very, very divisive person. And, um, I think that a candidate who tries to draw, you know, our, uh, draws together

• 19:16Speaker 01

  is going to have, uh, is gonna, is gonna develop a following. So I, I think the answer to your question is yes. I, I think it's possible that especially by making, I mean, by making the, uh, the, the algorithms, the social, the algo- algorithms, the social media, um, platforms, um, um, a, a target, uh, for criticism and, and, uh, I, I think that, uh, there are a lot of people who may feel, uh, that it's time that we rein some of that in and that we find, uh, our common humanity.

• 20:05Kara Swisher?

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• 20:48Kara Swisher?

  climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. Plus, The Guardian wants to emphasize they're not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more and listen wherever you get your podcasts, or watch on YouTube starting May 13.

• 21:08Speaker 05

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• 22:49Speaker 02

  I hope you're right, but implicit in what you're talking about is something that a lot of the marketers in my audience will be familiar with, which is the binary of should we be for something or against something, right? So, you know, back in 08, Obama was for, right? He was for change. He was for the change that the collective and the community could bring and what could happen and be done from that. Yes, we can. To your point about the current administration and really the way he's operated for, you know, at least the last 10 years.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:26Speaker 02

  He's against, right?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  He's against whatever's not for him. And I'm wondering, do you go in, you know, you refer to yourself as an eternal, I think, as an eternal optimist. I'm not sure you said eternal.

• 23:40Speaker 01

  I say idealist.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  Idealist, yeah.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  As an idealist, do you consider the, yeah, we can be against something too? Now, you've talked about against the algorithm.

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no. Look, I think that there is plenty to be against that doesn't pit you against your neighbor.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 24:04Speaker 01

  You know, so, I mean, there are forces that should be challenged. You know, we are awash in money that translates into power.

• 24:15Speaker 01

  That should be challenged. You know, the algorithms should be challenged. The fact that we have AI rolling out as quickly as it is without any serious policy about how we're going to create some guardrails in a mechanism that is taught to think like people, but has no moral or ethical construct. I mean, there are, there are all kinds of things that we should be against in the service of reform. That is really important if we're going to, if we're going to advance as a country. But pitting ourselves against each other, neighbor against neighbor.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  You know, you disagree with me. I think you're going to destroy America. I think you're evil. I, I, you know, I don't recognize your common humanity. I think people are tired of that. And, you know, I can't make an empirical case right at this moment, but I see a lot of focus groups and I hear a lot of discussion. And I feel there is a weariness of it. I, I think actually decency is going to have its day. I think people are so tired of who Trump is and how he operates that humility, empathy, integrity, honesty, the ability to unite rather than divide. I think those are going to be at a premium in 2028.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  And the person who emerges is, is going to reflect those, those qualities.

• 25:51Speaker 02

  Well, I certainly hope you're right, but it's a great segue to actually the second part of my first question, which was, you know, about brands, which is,

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  I used to say back in the day that I had two favorite brands, Santa Claus and America. Santa Claus, because where else could you see parents lining up for hours to put their children in the lap of a strange man just because he was wearing an outfit, a red outfit with a beard? Like, that's the power of a brand. But also America, because even back in the day, we still stood for something despite.

• 26:25Speaker 02

  The contradictions in some of our attitudes, our behaviors, rather. Again, coming at this with a very biased, progressive perspective. To me, it seems the last 18 months have done more to tarnish the American brand than at any time in my not-so-short life. And I'm wondering what you think the value of the brand of America has represented, the actual value in terms of, you know, policy and politics and getting shit done around the world, and if you see a way back from it.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Well, look, I think the American brand has been, you know, flawed as we are because we're human and we haven't, you know, we haven't always lived up to our best ideals. But we've done awfully well compared to, you know, other societies in the long march of of history. And it's reflected, honestly, in our success that, you know, the one of the tragedies of the last few years is the degree to which immigrants have been demonized. There's always been a sense that America's a place where you can make it and will have

• 27:43Speaker 01

  the freedom to make it. And now we are basically, instead of that great inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty, you feel like she, instead of a torch, should be holding out her hand and telling people not to come. That is a very destructive impulse, and it certainly undermines, it undermines our brand. And there are many other ways in which that is true. I speak, by the way, as the son of a refugee from Eastern Europe. Who came here with nothing when he was a child and I, one generation later, I was the senior advisor of the President of the United States, who happened to be an African

• 28:25Speaker 01

  American man. So, you know, that is part of the American mystique. In fact, I will tell you that when we were talking about Obama running for president, Michelle Obama said, what do you think you can bring that no one else can bring? And he said, well, I don't know. But there are a lot of ways to answer that. But he said, there's one thing I know. He said, when I take that oath of office, millions of young people will look at themselves differently and their prospects differently. And the world will look at us a little differently. His election was an affirmation of America at its best. The ability to progress, to self-correct, the idea that really anybody can succeed.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  All those things are, have been tarnished. You know, there are practical things about us being a world leader in terms of research and development and technology and all of that. That's all at risk. I mean, there's a lot. But at the core of it were the values that we're celebrating in the 250th year, that cherishes freedom, freedom to worship as you would, freedom to pursue your dreams. And we need to use the occasion, rather than

• 29:48Speaker 01

  celebrate the mad king we have today, to celebrate the values that animated those founders 250 years ago. And I, you know, but I'm not gonna, you know, I said I'm an idealist. I'm not a nut. I understand that we have greatly devalued the American brand. The, I keep telling people that the blast radius from this administration is going to be felt for generations to come. And it's going to be the work of all of us in the future to rebuild that. The destruction of USAID and

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Foreign aid and I know foreign aid is politically a very, very freighted subject because people have this notion that we're giving tons of money away to undeserving people.

• 30:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it and it is in a way philanthropy. We've saved millions and millions of people all over the world from starvation and disease. We've also in doing it won the goodwill of those people. We've also in doing it prevented conflict that and disease that would ultimately wash up on our shores.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  That's why I think of it less as philanthropy. I mean, obviously there is some philanthropy in it, no doubt, and as there should be. But I tend to think of it more as cause marketing, which is you're doing well by doing good. Right? There is a benefit to us by doing what we do for others. And I think, I think that the, you know this better than I by exponentially. But we've reduced things not to their least common denominator, but to their actually, you know, their absolutely fucking stupidest denominator. And foreign aid is seen as, as, you know, we're not getting anything back.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Well, and it was done, it was done in like overnight by a bunch of, you know, gamers and Elon Musk who know, knew the, the cost of everything and the value of nothing. And, and I think it will be, it will go down as one of the stupidest decisions, foreign policy decisions in the history of the country. But here's the, the fundamental issue is that Donald Trump has a philosophy. And that philosophy is the world is a jungle and the strong take what they want and the weak fall away. And rules and laws and norms and institutions are for suckers. And, and that is a very dangerous philosophy.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  That is the philosophy of Vladimir Putin. And, and, you know, to the degree that he has bent the US government to his philosophy and operated that way, it's been bad, it's been a blow to American democracy, but also to America's brand in the world. Because people, you know, why are we the default currency? And why are we, you know, we were viewed as the reliable.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  Country, the country, a country that people could count on, even if we had disagreements with us to operate a certain way.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  And that has been, you know, there's been great doubt caused by, so that is something that we're going to have to work to repair. Because as we're learning in Iran, having the biggest army is not the end of the story in a very interconnected world.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  I want to go back to something you mentioned earlier, kind of in passing. You see a lot of data, you've seen a lot of data for, you know, the breadth of your career.

• 33:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  I'm wondering two things. How do you use data to figure out what people actually value as opposed to what maybe they think they should value some, right? Because, you know, what's the famous quote, which is the moment you ask the question, you change the answer. And what I'm really interested in is like, are there moments when you've absolutely ignored the data and found, you know, a lot of value accretion because you did?

• 34:04Speaker 01

  Well, I'll tell you something. My mother was a newspaper reporter who ultimately, when her newspaper folded, became one of the pioneers in qualitative research.

• 34:16Speaker 02

  Oh, is that right?

• 34:17Speaker 01

  And she was the qualitative director for Young and Rubicam.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Really?

• 34:22Speaker 01

  And, but so I grew up like in this focus group culture. And when I became involved in politics, I was a real devotee to qualitative because ultimately, and part of this is, you know, I'm a journalist by training too. I want to hear in people's own words, what's going on in their lives, what's important to them, you know, what are the challenges they face? We, during the presidential races, and the second one in particular, you know, Joel

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Bennison, who was our pollster, also ran this ongoing ethnographic kind of project where people were just journaling. And we learned so much from all of that that helped shape the qualitative. But the qualitative wouldn't have been a, I mean, the quantitative, I should say, the polling, but it wouldn't, it wouldn't have been nearly as rich. Campaigns and messaging in campaigns is an art as well as a science. And you need to, you need to have a feel for what people are telling you.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  And I, you know, I worry a little bit that we've become so empirical that we, you know, we test everything and if something does, you know, a tenth of a percentage point better than the other thing, then we're going to go with that and so on. You know, and I, I think that we are, we are burying ourselves in analytics in a way that, that destroys the, the art of, of, of marketing.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  I, I'm wondering, agreeing with you completely, and there's a great quote from a great, I think he was, must have been an admin, British admin, David Abbott, that I'll paraphrase, which is if you A B test two things that suck, one's still going to win.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:23Speaker 02

  And I'm wondering, and I didn't know that about your mother and, you know, I imagine dinner table conversations were pretty rich and interesting. Do you think of yourself as a marketer?

• 36:33Speaker 01

  No, I think of myself as a storyteller. Yes, I mean, I was in the marketing business for sure. And, you know, I resist, I only resist terms like marketing and brands because out of reverence for the mission of what politics should be. And I never wanted to, you know, there was a great book in 1968 called The Selling of the President by Joe McGinnis about how they marketed Richard Nixon and so on. You know, that, and it was a really interesting book and they did, they, they kind of, they sanded down the rough edges on Nixon. They put him on laughing and they did some things to make him.

• 37:18Speaker 02

  Tanned, rested and ready?

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Human.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yes, more human for his, for, for voters. At the end of the day, they. They won the race through not so subtle racial appeals, but which was very much consistent with who Nixon was.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  But so I resist those terms, but obviously when you we are trying to make a sale. I mean, and it's very intensive because you can have a product that lives for decades. In an election, you've got a matter of months.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  You know, maybe in a presidential race, years, but in a generally a matter of months. And people are going to have a choice and they are going to decide.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  And it's binary.

• 38:11Speaker 01

  And it's binary. And so you really need to think about that. And so I always used to work back from I what? What do I want people to be thinking when they walk in that polling place? What are they what I want them to think about? Not just my candidate and the other candidate, but what is the choice about?

• 38:33Speaker 02

  Mm hmm.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  And I tried to drive those conversations that way.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  You know?

• 38:40Speaker 02

  Which I think at least from my seat makes you a marketer. And of course you're a marketer.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 02

  And I'm wondering.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  I'm a self loathing marketer.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  Yes, aren't we all?

• 38:55Speaker 06

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• 39:40Speaker 06

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• 40:06Kara Swisher?

  I'm Kara Swisher and I like people who say the quiet part out loud. In fact, I love it. That's Tiger Sisters, a new podcast that recently joined the Vox Media Podcast Network. Cherie Brooke Lu and Jean Lu are real sisters who built their careers at LinkedIn and Goldman Sachs. On their weekly podcast, they're giving the next generation practical tips on how to get ahead, how to write emails people actually answer, how to make your LinkedIn profile stand out, and how to keep learning as an adult. It's straight talk about money, career, and relationships every Monday. Follow Tiger Sisters wherever you get your podcasts.

• 40:47Speaker 02

  I'm wondering, what parallels do you see, two or three maybe, between the selling of a candidate and the selling of toothpaste, right? Which is, you know, where do you see the parallels? Or where do you see the disconnects?

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, the parallels are what I just referenced, which is people are going to make a choice. There are a lot of brands of toothpaste. So what is it? What are the qualities about your toothpaste that appeal, that would appeal?

• 41:29Speaker 02

  Incrementally.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  To, uh, to, yeah, it's different because you don't have to win, you don't have to get 51% of the market in, when you're selling toothpaste.

• 41:42Speaker 01

  So it's a little, a little different in that way. Uh, but you do need, the whole thing boils down to comparative advantages on things that people most value about that, about toothpaste.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And so what is it about your toothpaste that matches up with their, um, essential needs and desires relative to toothpaste?

• 42:05Speaker 02

  What, what I think is, is interesting about the references, you know, if you compare a lot of the marketing that a lot of toothpaste, just to stick with it, do, they're all kind of marketing the same thing, which is, you know, a better smile, fresher breath and whiter teeth. And, and, and I think the, the product and service, the inhumane, not inhumane, the, um, non-human, uh, product and service marketers, too often, they're just saying the same effing thing over and over again.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 42:31Speaker 02

  Not finding that source of competitive differentiation, um, or kind of that strategic way in, which is actually where I want to go next, which is in the description of, of your podcast, Hacks on Tap, which for our listeners is available everywhere you listen and on YouTube if you choose to watch.

• 42:48Speaker 01

  And brought to you by Vox Media.

• 42:50Speaker 02

  And brought to you by our shared partners at Vox Media.

• 42:55Speaker 02

  You invite the listener to know, quote, what's going on behind the scenes and where strategic decisions are being made. Yeah, you say, pull up a stool. Where are strategic decisions being made?

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Well, in a good campaign, there's usually a strategic hub. There is a, you know, I'll, I'll use the Obama campaign as a, as an example, but you know, uh, my business partner, David Pluff, was the manager, um, and managed, uh, you know, a lot of the operations of the campaign. I was the- You know, the kind of message strategist, I managed that part of the campaign. But there was a core group in in my group that involved a pollster. I did an interesting thing, I think it was it was interesting to me anyway.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  But normally you'd hire a pollster and that pollster would do both the qualitative and quantitative. I hired a pollster, Joel Benenson, and a qualitative guy, David Binder, who who was a brilliant, brilliant qualitative researcher. He does polling as well, but I hired him only for purposes of doing qualitative. And he was on the road doing three focus groups a night, you know, around the country. But when we had to make key strategic decisions, Pluff would be there. I would be there. You know, some of the if we wanted the research guys in there, they would come. But it wasn't a large group.

• 44:30Speaker 01

  And oftentimes in the campaign, it boiled down to Pluff and me and the candidate.

• 44:38Speaker 01

  And that's the way I mean, someone has to drive the train.

• 44:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  And if you have the one sign of distress in a campaign is if 20 people are sitting around a table trying to make a strategic decision.

• 44:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, it doesn't work.

• 44:53Speaker 01

  It doesn't.

• 44:54Speaker 02

  I'm I'm wondering, and let's, I mean, you've run what and advised someone like 140, 150 campaigns over the last period of your career.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:06Speaker 02

  You got a story and let's let's think at a smaller, smaller presidential of where you made a you look back, you're like, that was the wrong strategic decision. The consequences were just not what you anticipated.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  I imagine, I'm not a woman, but like childbirth, you remember. You remember the pleasure and you try and forget the pain.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:31Speaker 01

  You asked me for not a, let me give you a presidential example because it could, it travels. We had a two week period in March of 2008 when we were running against Hillary Clinton and Texas and Ohio were voting on the same day. If we had won either of those, she would have had to, and they said, we'll, we'll drop out if we don't win those. We spent a lot of money and time and effort trying to win in those two weeks. But we also changed what we were doing and we went after her in a very traditional kind of way, you know? We hooked her up to NAFTA and we, and it became a very sort of familiar and dreary kind of campaign for those two weeks.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  That was completely antithetical to the, to our brand.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  It was our brand, yeah.

• 46:20Speaker 01

  It was, it was antithetical to our brand and we lost both those and we deserved to lose both those and we learned, uh, we learned from that. But there, I'm sure I can think of analogous, uh, situations that, um, uh, from, from smaller campaigns as well. Because, you know, in these kind of dynamic situations, you, you're constantly making strategic decisions. Maybe more so than in brand advertising or brand messaging because, um, of the kind of, uh, the pace of political campaigns and the calendar of political campaigns.

• 46:59Speaker 02

  Well, and to your point, they need to get 51%.

• 47:02Speaker 01

  And you don't often have, I mean, I guess you do somewhat, but it's less, uh, it's less, uh, common to have the, you know, one toothpaste going negative on the other toothpaste. Um, it happens, but you know, we, you are constantly under fire from the other side. And if you're not, it's because you're not doing very well. So, uh, that's something you have to respond and react to and how you do it is really important. You know, I, I ran a campaign for, uh, Tom Vilsack, who became the Agriculture Secretary later, but Governor of Iowa.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  And it was forever an attack that Iowa Republicans ran against Iowa Democrats, that Iowa Democrats opposed the death penalty.

• 47:50Speaker 01

  And they came at us on that and they used the example of a small child who had been molested and killed, some horrible story. And they said, you know, if Tom Vilsack were governor, he would not give that person, it may have been a fictitious story, the death penalty. And there was a panic among Democrats there and they said, you've got to fire back, you got to hit him back on his crime record and this and that. And my instinct was, no, that's not part of our brand. That's not who we are. He, Vilsack

• 48:28Speaker 01

  was very much in the same kind of, you know, category as Obama. He was, you know, a tonally in that same place. And instead, we did a direct to camera, in which he said, you know, my opponent is running ads that, you know, are offensive to me as a, as a husband and as a father, you know, that's his plan to win this election. He says, but I don't, but you know what I want to talk about? And then he went on to talk about their lives

• 49:07Speaker 01

  and where they differed on stuff. And, and it finished with him saying, my opponent's counting on 11th hour attack ads to win this election. I'm counting on you. And it was very, very powerful. Yeah. You know, so part of it is understanding how to respond within the context of your message.

• 49:32Speaker 02

  So actually on that, and we just have a couple of minutes left. Yeah. I've got two questions for you. Yeah. So the first is, I referenced this earlier and you certainly have, you've, you've described your entire career as being at its core about storytelling. I asked if you thought of yourself as a marketer, you said, no, a storyteller.

• 49:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  And figuring out what the story of each candidate campaign in the moment.

• 49:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  And then telling it.

• 49:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:55Speaker 02

  I'm wondering what advice, as one of the great storytellers of the last decade. You have for the CEOs, CFOs and CMOs in my audience on how to tell stories, whether you're selling toothpaste or presidential candidates in today's world where attentions are shrinking.

• 50:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  It's not that attentions are shrinking, the competition is ever.

• 50:17Speaker 01

  Well, yes, and, and, and the habits, consumer habits in terms of information is so fractionalized now. But, um, listen, and this may be sound like a cliche because it's used so often, but,

• 50:35Speaker 01

  understand what your authentic comparative advantages are, understand what your authentic brand is, and, um, try and, uh, develop all your messaging within that frame. Don't, you know, try and tell a consistent story about why people are drawn, have been, would be drawn to you. Don't try and reinvent your message, uh, again and again and again, because you will not develop any kind of brand loyalty. Unless people really come to believe this is what it's about, this is why I'm drawn to it.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  And then understand the people you're talking to and their lives and how the two things fit together. When I say I'm a storyteller, um, the story of your candidate offers validation to the messages that you're going to deliver. Tom Vilsack was an orphan who was adopted by a very troubled family. And his father ended up selling everything he owned. He found out after the fact to help him go to college. And education was a huge issue in Iowa. He told that story, but then he talked about Iowa and he said, I'm going to do for Iowa what my dad did for me. I'm going to put education first. And that became a steady theme throughout our campaign.

• 52:00Speaker 01

  And people believed it because they heard his story.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  Because of where it was coming from. I do think one of the lessons for brands today is to be more humane, but I'll have. Get interviewed about that. Last question for you, Seth. It's the way we end every episode, which is if you had all the power in the world, what's one thing you'd create tomorrow? Not next week, but tomorrow? And what's one thing you'd destroy? Doesn't you can answer it through any lens, any aperture, anything that comes to mind?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  Well, just to follow through on what I said before, I'm kind of obsessed with with this right now. I would destroy the ability of algorithms to use data, big data, to try and inflame us against each other. I would try, you know, and I'm not a technologist. I don't know. And then conversely, I would try and create social media brands that appeal to the better angels of our nature and not the worst. And I would market them that way.

• 53:03Speaker 01

  You know, and again, I have no idea if that could, you know, I mean, I'm now flying in the face of a lot of deep research that says that, you know, negativism and antagonism and hate and anger and conspiracy theories work. But, you know, I'm just, I'd love to see us have a revolution of common humanity against all of that. And I'd like to see vehicles to promote it that can prove the theory that I'm advancing here.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Let those be the last words. David Axelrod.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Thank you, Seth.

• 53:45Speaker 02

  Thank you so much.

• 53:47Speaker 01

  Thanks for inviting me. I enjoyed it.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  On Hacks on Tap.

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Bye, man. Thank you.

• 53:54Speaker 02

  Before we go, consider this. A US presidential campaign is trying to persuade a couple of hundred million people to choose one product over another in one moment on one day. A pretty large scale marketing challenge. And most every campaign runs a national media driven air war of messaging ads and posts while simultaneously conducting a ground war that has the candidates and surrogates knocking on doors, showing up on TV, showing up at diners in towns most people can't find on a map, shaking hands in living rooms in Des Moines, eating bratwurst at county fairs in Wisconsin, and kissing babies in church parking lots in South Carolina. Because somewhere in the long history of democratic politics and R I P. American democracy, the people who do this for a living figured out that scale doesn't

• 54:39Speaker 02

  replace intimacy, it depends on it. The national campaign helps makes your positions known. The handshake helps get you chosen and you need both because voters, the same people you might call consumers or customers, can feel the difference between a candidate who showed up and one who assumed showing up wasn't necessary. Political operatives call the show of in-person work, the ground game. And the lesson from 250 years of American politics is that the ground game isn't a supplement to the air war. It's a thing that converts the air war into a result. So here's the question for every C E O and C F O listening. When your company decides to cut marketing, close a store, replace a human with a chatbot or automate a process that used to involve a human, there may be very good reasons for doing so.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  But do you understand you're also making decisions about the ground game's role in value creation or destruction? Because right call or not, every one of these changes what the customer experiences, feels and remembers, which means every one of them is either creating or destroying value. Business is just like politics, except you have to get people to vote with their dollars all day, every day, not just during an electoral cycle. So the question worth asking is whether anyone in the company is accounting for what the relationship between the air war and the ground game creates before they decide to change it. Today's episode was produced by Art Chung, Julian Verlars, Jim Mackel, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman with the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdom is Company.

• 56:08Speaker 06

  Thanks for listening to this special episode of Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlin. We'll be back with a new episode of On with Kara Swisher on Monday.