blowback is one of the reasons why the brands don't go well. it's a lot through inference. the big airline industry bus never mention delta or american airline. >> i think airline names, skyline i think is the ad that charges for bags. they don't even want to mention one of the delta or american. >> to avoid that buy their choice. to just make the point and leave the take away about your brand but not necessarily always have the negativity associated with it. >> in one of the earlier points, historically, primary fights were more civil when you had five or six candidates, maybe for the reason you alluded to, he mentioned in 2004 when gephardt 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. are there examples of -- this is to both of you of other negative campaigns in the commercial space that 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. slow cooking through pressure cookers. it can come back and bite you. >> advertisers don't advertise about the fact that there were no crashes last week.

>> 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. i think there's a lot of keeping your powder dry for brands that wrath their than risk the gotcha back and forth they will choose not to advertise. i think that's happening more and more is that it's like comparison. political advertising feels like it's gone to the extreme. super negative super quick. for grand advertising i'm intrigued watching audi and bmws. in the rise of audi, audi is taking on bmw and trying to deposition them as a choice doing so through humor and promoting their brands, not by going all of the negative. not seeing that as a bad car, just our car is better now. that kind of argument works better in the commercial arena than in the presidential arena.

i can't believe we're in the same commercial with these people. sometimes geico is 15 minute 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 had to buy this insurance if you love your children. and now it's, no, get the one that makes the most sense financially and don't make it so heavy. >> do you find that you often have to talk clients out of mixing it up more? do they come to you sometimes saying we can't believe this other fast food chain is charging 25 cents more for their

burger, let's go for them? do you have to come to help and on the contrary you have to push them into some comparison? >> clients love their brands and we love their brands. so often we believe fervently they have the better product or the better brand. often thaul they'll want to brow out that distink and i think the call clus for us is what will sell your product and brand and sell it for the long term, not just the short term. there's always a cheap quick get but does that vision for the product that gets you to buy it the second time, the third time. the other thing that's important in terms of birchss is political advertising and commercial is the time frame. one of the things as a ad guy in the commercial world i've been blown away than most is the speed of response and speed of tv advertising. it feels like there's a rise in the insta ad 35 minutes after a bedate ends watching on you to

be an ad rebutting or promoting on something that's set. the speed to market belies that would map on the commercial side. it comes back because we can do things very quickly but not many big corporations are built like that. they can't go through his agency or mine could the an ad for you overnight but you wouldn't get it approved. >> and that's as little as ten days, digital ads in a day. the amount of times it takes you to make the ad or get it approved. 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 in the world of brands and in the world of commercial advertising. >> we're more concerned about being taken to court. not saying something to -- >> it's an important distinction. we don't have the same first amendment detections to say anything. when you represent a public company or private company you've got a much greater call le challenge to meet the fair standard. the rules and the level of scrutiny means the comparisons are more valid or more clear. >> yes, i think it was -- there was some question earlier about whether th balances and remedies and the political sphere, and there are, libel laws apply. when you talk about public figures and also conversation earlier about the extent to which local broadcasters assume their power to say, you know, we don't think this flies factually. they often don't want to get in that business for obvious

reasons. so it's true. i was wondering about we talked a lot about the phenomenon of super groups and super pacs, citizens united. eight years ago it was the 527s. always seem to be independent, unaffiliated groups that can go a lot nastier for reasons you alluded to, blowback effect to the candidate or the brand itself if it's involved in the negative messaging. i don't suppose we really have anything akin to that unaffiliated third party that can go nuclear in the commercial pace. you, jamie, are natively general. are there sort of gorilla campaigns that brands can engage in 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 snoes notion -- the dynamic of having an arms length with a group that can get more negative? >> we talk often about branded and unbranded campaign. offense they launch it to seed or unseed a point of view. the pharma world does it a lot. the pharmaceutical world might want you to take interest in a bladder disorder. that might be an unbranded ad and what they could say about bladder disorder and that might be followed by a branded advertisement for their bladder solution having paved the way. there's 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 those we will take on a myth call company or theoretical company and it's lost on who we are attacking. those are the two analogs for me. >> i think there's a sensitivity

that people feel in corporations. for example, our walmart client is sensitive to the fact that they can't be out there saying we're doing the sustainability thing. what they have -- what their customers say, customers say, look, wul 200 million walmart shopper it is we all do this, it will make a difference. the customers get credit for it. because 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 important. analog different from the advertising world. ken talks about the rough parody between republicans and democrats, most cycles would spend spin. that's not true in our categories. there's a lead competitor. there's a number two. often there's a great distance

between those top one or two come petters 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. from some of the earlier examples often the leader doesn't want to respond to the guy that's at 5% even if he makes a negative ad. often i make the challenger ads and i'm thrilled with the response. when hp responds, 1% share player with its 80% 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 parody. it's what you can afford to spend and that's driven very often by market share. >> i think one of the big differences ted myers and his partners out there one of the reasons they're hero to everyone

in their business is not just what they did with the daisy ad but they krcreated an humanity their darad. >> volkswagen ad. >> the super bowl ad with the day v darth vader. there's still that humanity that our clients want to own. and the politicians, you know, it is a tough business and they do have to be thick skinned. >> ever done political ad? either one of you? >> i have not. >> i did back in the '70 as long time ago. we got a call from a billionaire. a guy in the 1/50 -- top 150 people in the forbes billionaire list, a couple of months ago asking us, i like your geico ads. i want to go after barack obama. would you guys do this? and they took my partner and me

a couple of minutes to say, no, we're not going to do that. and it's, you know, so i sit out there and i hear $2.5 billion, and i thought, why didn't i do that? i said, but, it's not the kind of business that you would feel good about in the morning. you know? >> is that the reason or if you're in that business you might offend your client? >> both of us are -- have the same parent company. the parent company doesn't let us do political advertising. >> corporate customers. you're talking about. >> right. >> so our clients presumably occupy a broad range of political points of view and the last thing they want is their agency to represent only one point of view and all of is a sudden a commercial world you limit your client to those conservative company or progressive companies. so it's also bad business, i think, as much as --

>> we have -- we encourage our people to work on their own outside the agents in the campaign. engive them some time off but we don't dictate what their politics should be. >> i asked earlier 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 we've seen a lot today, dating back to those incredibly painful eisenhower ads, do you pick up ideas or transit that might translate or are they just so buy their and so black and white around so vicious that you u.s. just kind of laugh at them? >> i definitely think they're using some of that quick turn, some of that inabout response. i think there's a bit of a feedback move between the commercial side and political side. i'm struck by this cycle by the lack though of branding.

commercial advertising is so much about building a brand over time. when i look at obama's success and winning that election, to me part of what he did was build such a strong brand all of the way through the primaries, you know, the democratic convention served to really relaunch that brand and to me it carried through the election. this cycle, i don't see a consistency from any of these candidates and how they want to show up. i think that's an analog from our world that feels to me like it's sorely missing in the political call world. it's very today's fight, today's need versus that kind of longer-term view. >> i'm not a fan of ron paul but i do think his advertising has been the best because he has a consistency about him of 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, there's a reason that we don't encourage brands to change their campaign every six months or every where. there's a reason that tony the tiger is still tony the tiger that we build, you know, what a logo looks like and even what commercials look like and we change them very carefully and relatively slow he because that particularity is what builds favoritibility. i think that familiarity is not what's happening for these political candidates in part because they keep changing their message. i think you're dead right, ron paul has been super consistent. i think i know what i'm going to see in his ads and i know what he's going to hop upped and lose his cool. i think that works to tell those voters who are going to vote for him, what they're basing it on. 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. that's been true in our commercial world for a long time because most of the brands is

national. it feels relatively new, that stuff is to easily disbursed. the iowa pander hurts you in florida a month later. >> it's funny. in the last debate, besides ron paul, i think it was debate number 20, when cnn, the moderator asked each candidate to define themselves with one word, the one word ron paul chose was consistent. it's interesting to hear you all pros in the business of branding seeing that in his message iing there one commercial, michael, that has seen what he's done? >> in the political? >> not in the political world necessarily. political space, one campaign, one commercial that you admire the most that you say, ah, i wish i had done that? >> the one on everyone's minds these days is the big apple commercial, different. wouldn't it be nice if political candidate could find something that inspiring.

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 did their commercial foray again and the morning in america were the same people who did the bartles and james commercials and ge "bring good things to life" were the really top professional people in our industry. it chose 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 context, it's just too uncomfortable for us. >> whatever happened to wine

coolers? i remember those ads, those guys. jamie, is there something -- >> now we leave the liquor so it sells the liquor on the. the business has changed. i was struck, you know, i love the daisy ad. i'm a political junkie. it was a moment in political advertising where it all changed in an instant. i was struck watching it for the first time in a while, the similarly to that story in 1984 and that air one's fundamentally different message, a message that -- but. >> the apple ad. >> apple ad. to run a commercial to be reaired. it's not something 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 we're going put out there is going to draw and what conversation will that response start? i think the politicians have started toic what up to that game a little bit? it feels like there's more than ever before a commercial made for the 9:00 hour on cable news.

response based advertising instead of stimulus base. don't tell me what you want to tell me. let me draw my own conclusions. hitting on the head for me. >> i think a take waway from yor conversation for me that i hadn't thought about was the absence of branding that we've seen 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, my hope, might get a moment there between that moment and the conventions and the general election season to engage in that positive branding. it will be interesting to watch that going forward. but that insight that you provided is really helpful. you have something to say? >> i do want to open it up to comments. >> we built in systemic brand vehicle so very consciously, after the election when it's all

over, we do a dramatic inauguration and we do a dramatic run-up -- when you say we. >> we, the country. the country. the reason we do that is to make the president above this all and above the day-to-day politics. i think branding is important for the candidates but i think it's equally important that we then take that step back and make them above that ugly mess of politics. it feels like this is going to be annuallyi allyier year. the choice to reband the president as the president, not as candidate we said all of those mean things about. >> although increasingly i would argue that's happening less. the campaign never seems to end. the legitimacy of the president is questioned by the opposition more so than in the past. i get what you're saying. >> part of this is that now candidates for their whole life have to be careful that they're always against the other side. and they don't want anything coming back at them. my agency did the commercial

with 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 the we campaign, because we wanted all americans against global warming. >> explain what that ad was for. >> al gore started the alliance for conduit protection. >> right. >> and he put to the a board that was half republican and half democrat. and we competed for the business and we won. and the whole idea of the m campaign was that we were going to bring both sides together on this. there was some natithe naivety part. it's impossible to celebrate l politics from al gore in most people's minds. >> did mitt romney send you a thank you note? >> let's open it up.

here in the front? >> wihat do you think as far as the market research, scientific study that's done in your commercial world as compared with political world and, also, what influences are there from other nations, other cultures as far as what works with their advertising and how that has effected or not affected american, i guess, particularly political advertising? >> well, i think one thing that, you know, one thing that's happened, the international influences on american advertising i think we're getting more visual in our story telling, less based on articulated positions. and for better and for worse sometimes. i think in politics it is -- it

is -- we know from a lot of research that consumers are really overwhelmed by choice. if we have all these choices, how do i their row it down so i can make a decision, so i don't keep putting a 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 negative ads because i think that will at the time get them elected faster because it will help eliminate the competition in that choice procedure. >> i would run negative ads, too. to answer the other part of your question, the range of research we do for a particular client or campaign varies but it's getting a group of the representative target in a room. share either work in process or final ad, gauge reaction, what's good, what's bad, what's working, what's not working. we v revise the adz and put it in

front of hundreds and at times thousands of people and understand what works and what doesn't. that's some clients. another kind of client will look at an ad, look at an idea and say make me that and want it on air in a week or two. it really is a big range. i think the difference is it feels like the political world shifts a little more quickly. your perception of brands is pretty engrained. it will shift but it won't shift overnight. we've got a little bit of a longer time on which to do that research to put a m campaign in market. for a politician, when i look at the world that rick santorum is advertising into this week versus four weeks ago, my god, you know, the, a d campaign would have been cut four different times in the four weeks based on who we think he is at that moment and who he needs to project he's going to be going forward to win an election. >> you didn't really is to explain how the process works because we've all watched "mad men," we know how it works. he calls them in their office and there's an ad the next morn.

do you see a surge in your work because of "mad men," the glamorous life that you lead? i'm kidding. not just the drinking. seems like a lot of fun. background, blue shirt. >> mark brosky, retired physicist. there seems to be one analog in the commercial world with a rapid response and that's the super bowl ads. i mean, the minute the super bowl is over, there's a lot of press for response to those ads. now is that changing commercial advertising and are super bowl ads getting better or worse as a result? >> i won't say better or worse, but the thing i would tell you super bowl advertising now starts three weeks before the super bowl, not the minute the super bowl ends. literally vw a year ago we released the 40 spot about ten days before and it had 10 million hits, viewers on youtube, before the super bowl

had ever started. a good percentage of the country had seen it and decided they liked it and "usa today" polled one of the big ones decides super bowl success was in many ways influence bid that social media vote of what was good before. so i this do think the super bowl is an unusual moment of scrutiny for advertising. we don't care and we don't ask about advertising for the most part. we try and tell ourselves it doesn't affect us and we don't pay attention if super bowl is the moment where we tune in and watch the ads. so there's become a great gain to see whose ads will be effective. it does change that way. in terms of preparation, just the sure spend involved in a super bowl spot drives a long cycle of what is the right piece of creative we should put out there. there's not that many moments on network television anymore where you can get an audience of a billion people. only one or two the whole year so it's a moment to break new news, to break a new campaign, to launch a new product so it does, in general, requires way more preparation than a normal

spot. >> in the front here. >> greg shepman. i want to thank the foundation. this is fantastic for all of us political advertising judg junk. one thing i wanted to talk about is the rock em sockem in politics. where they're willing to go head to head because of the damage of the blowback that will come from something like that. and what i was curious about was if you apply this to a different industry, okay, i'm in higher education and one of the things we're facing is for profits, which is getting a lot of headway because of the advertising that they're able to spend and because it's sort of overwhelms probably not unlike what state farm and allstate do with geico, just the amount of

money being thrown out to advertise, does that change perception and how do you avoid any blowback as a sector because i think that's where some of the brands try to play is, okay, we can't do it head to head but if i can do it as a sector, if i can do it through a trade group or issue advocacy group, great as a coalition. i was wondering if you can talk about that. >> i'm a wife who is a teacher who i have to be very careful in talking about education. i think there is enough money in the education field, whether it's on the union side supporting public workers, there's ability to land a perception if the discussion was can we do advertising and can we change perception of the business. i certainly think that's something that's possible. i also think that we're talking about advertising but we're in the business of marketing and that transcends advertising and impede messages we put out there through social media, there are many ways to land your message.

i think there's an opportunity to get out and front and tell their story a little bit. i think what happens is educator, i'm big narrative and lose control of the narrative and lose forces whatever the field is, you're in trouble because then you're left to rebut why are you getting paid so much, why aren't you measuring instead of here is how successful we are, how can we improve it. part of it is grabbing control of the narrative and advertising is one of the ways to do that. >> i appreciate the reference of the boeing, look heed martin becau -- lockheed martin because that is a peculiar type of campaign that bridges the commercial space and the political space and we have these fights for government contracts that do have this feeling of zero sum, winner take all, and they can get quite nasty and they're conducted -- people riding the metro in washington are subjected to ads on the metro for things that