Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

28:41David Axelrod: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 look at themselves differently and their prospects differently. And the world will look at us a little differently. 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.

29:22David Axelrod:All those things 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 celebrate the mad king we have today to celebrate the values that animated those founders 250 years ago. I said I'm an idealist. I'm not a nut. I understand that we have greatly devalued the American brand.

30:23David Axelrod: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 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. Yeah. Yeah. But it and it is, in a way, philanthropy. We 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.

31:14David Axelrod:uh you know so i think of it less as 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, you know, we're not getting anything back. Well, and it was done in like overnight by a bunch of, you know, gamers and Elon Musk, who knew the cost of everything and the value of nothing.

32:05David Axelrod:And I think it will go down as one of the stupidest decisions, foreign policy decisions in the history of the country. But here's 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 that is a very dangerous philosophy. That is the philosophy of Vladimir Putin. And, you know, to the degree that he has bent the U.S. government to his philosophy and operated that way, it's been a blow to American democracy, but also to America's brand in the world.

32:58David Axelrod:Because people, you know, why are we the default currency? And why are we, We were viewed as the reliable country, a country that people could count on, even if they had disagreements with us to operate a certain way. And that has been, you know, there's been great doubt caused by it. 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. 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.

33:50David Axelrod:Yeah. So 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? Because 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? 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. Is that right? And she was the qualitative director for Young and Rubicam.

34:36David Axelrod:Really? Legend. 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, 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, what are the challenges they face. We, during the presidential races, the second one in particular, Joel Benenson, who was our poster, 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 i mean the quantitative i should say the polling but it wouldn't near it wouldn't have been nearly as rich campaigns and messaging and campaigns is an art as well as a science.

35:45David Axelrod:And you need to have a feel for what people are telling you. And I worry a little bit that we've become so empirical that we test everything. And if something does a tenth of a percentage point better than the other thing, then we're going to go with that and so on. And, you know, and I think that we are burying ourselves in analytics in a way that destroys the art of marketing. I'm wondering, agreeing with you completely, and there's a great quote from a great, I think he 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.

36:37David Axelrod:Right. 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? 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. And, you know, that—and it was a really interesting book.

37:22David Axelrod:And they did—they kind of—they sanded down the rough edges on Nixon. They put him on laugh-in. They did some things to make him more— Hand-rested and ready. Human. Yeah. Yes. More human for his—for voters. At the end of the day, they won the race through not-so-subtle racial appeals.

37:49David Axelrod:which was very much consistent with who Nixon was. Yes. So I resist those terms. But obviously, 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, you know, maybe in a presidential race years, but generally a matter of months. And people are going to have a choice and they are going to decide. And it's binary. And it's binary. And so you really need to think about that. And so I always used to work back from what do I want people to be thinking when they walk in that polling place? What do I want them to think about?

38:44David Axelrod:Not just my candidate and the other candidate, but what is the choice about? And I tried to drive those conversations that way. Which I think, at least from my seat, makes you a marketer. And of course, you're a marketer. I mean, yeah. And I'm wondering. I'm a self-loathing marketer. Yeah, aren't we all?

39:30Seth Matlins:Instant replays. The FIFA World Cup, streaming live on Fox 1, offers a subject to change. See Fox.com for complete terms and conditions. Who cares about your poops? Ollie does. That's why Ollie's science-backed gut health lineup helps support your family's regularity. From daily probiotics to fiber gummies your kiddos will love. Find it all on Ollie.com. That's O-L-L-Y.com. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

40:29Seth Matlins:symptoms. Allerge your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness can be signs of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Side effects may include allergic reactions, neck and injection site pain, fatigue, and headache. Allergic reactions can include rash, welts, asthma symptoms, and dizziness. Don't receive Botox if there's a skin infection. Tell your doctor your medical history, muscle or nerve conditions, including ALS Lou Gehrig's disease, myasthenia gravis or Lambert-Eaton syndrome, and medications, including botulinum toxins, as these may increase the risk of serious side effects.

41:00Seth Matlins:Why wait? Ask your doctor, visit BotoxChronicMigraine.com, or call 1-800-44-BOTOX to learn more.

41:11David Axelrod: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? 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 would appeal to, yeah, it's different because you don't have to get 51 % of the market when you're selling toothpaste. So it's a little different in that way. But you do need, the whole thing boils down to comparative advantages on things that people most value about toothpaste.

42:20David Axelrod:And so what is it about your toothpaste that matches up with their essential needs and desires relative to toothpaste? What I think is interesting about the references, 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 a better smile, fresher breath and whiter teeth. And I think the product and service, the non-human product and service marketers too often. They're just saying the same effing thing over and over again. They're not finding that source of competitive differentiation or kind of that strategic way in, which is actually where I want to go next, which is in the description of your podcast, Hacks on Tap, which for our listeners is available everywhere you listen and on YouTube if you choose to watch.

43:13David Axelrod:And brought to you by Vox Media. And brought to you by our shared partners at Vox Media. You invite the listener to know, quote, what's going on behind the scenes and where strategic decisions are being made. You say, pull up a stool. Where are strategic decisions being made? Well, in a good campaign, there's usually a strategic hub. There is a, you know, I'll use the Obama campaign as a as an example. But, you know, my business partner, David Plouffe, was the manager and managed, 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.

43:59David Axelrod:But there was a core group in my group that involved a poll. I did an interesting thing, I think. It was interesting to me anyway. 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 was a brilliant, brilliant qualitative researcher. He does polling as well, but I hired him only for purposes of doing qualitative. 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, Plouffe would be there.

44:43David Axelrod: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. And oftentimes in the campaign, it boiled down to Plouffe and me and the candidate. And that's the way, I mean, someone has to drive the train. Yeah. 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. Yeah, it doesn't work. It doesn't work. I'm wondering, and let's, I mean, you've run what, and advised something like 140, 150 campaigns over the last period of your career. Yeah. You got a story, and let's think at a smaller than presidential, of where you look back, you're like, that was the wrong strategic decision.

45:41David Axelrod:The consequences were just not what you anticipated. I imagine, I'm not a woman, but like childbirth, you remember the pleasure and you try and forget the pain. Yeah. But you asked me for not a – let me give you a presidential example because 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 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.

46:24David Axelrod:And we went after her in a very traditional kind of way. You know, we hooked her up to NAFTA. And it became a very sort of familiar and dreary kind of campaign for those two weeks that was completely antithetical to our brand. It was off-brand, yeah. It was antithetical to our brand. And we lost both those, and we deserve to lose both those. And we learned from that. But I'm sure I can think of analogous situations from smaller campaigns as well. Because, you know, in these kind of dynamic situations, you're constantly making strategic decisions. Maybe more so than in brand advertising or brand messaging because of the kind of the pace of political campaigns and the calendar of political campaigns.

47:24David Axelrod:Well, to your point, you need to get 51%. And you don't often have, I mean, I guess you do somewhat, but it's less common to have the, you know, one toothpaste going negative on the other toothpaste. It happens. But, you know, you are constantly under fire from the other side. And if you're not, it's because you're not doing very well. So that's something you have to respond and react to. And how you do it is really important. You know, I ran a campaign for Tom Vilsack, who became the agriculture secretary later, but governor of Iowa. And it was forever an attack that Iowa Republicans ran against Iowa Democrats, that Iowa Democrats opposed the death penalty.

48:14David Axelrod: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've 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. Vilsack was very much in the same kind of, you know, category as Obama. He was, you know, tonally in that same place.

49:03David Axelrod: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 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 and where they differed on stuff. And, uh, 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, you know? So part of it is understanding how to respond within the context of your message.

49:56David Axelrod:So actually on that, and we just have a couple of minutes left, and I've got two questions for you. So the first is, I referenced this earlier, and you certainly have. 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. and figuring out what the story of each candidate campaign in the moment is and then telling it. I'm wondering what advice, as one of the great storytellers of the last decades, 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.

50:38David Axelrod:It's not that attentions are shrinking. The competition is ever-experienced. Well, yes. And the habits, consumer habits in terms of information is so fractionalized now. But listen, and this may be sound like a cliche because it's used so often, but understand what your authentic comparative advantages are. Understand what your authentic brand is and try and 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 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 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 the story of your candidate offers validation to the messages that you're going to deliver.

51:57David Axelrod: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. And people believed it because they heard his story. 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 get interviewed about that.

52:35David Axelrod:Last question for you. So 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. You can answer it through any lens, any aperture, anything that comes to mind. Well, just to follow through on what I said before, I'm kind of obsessed 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 worse.

53:25David Axelrod:And I would market them that way. Um, 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 let those be the last words David Axelrod thank you Seth thank you so much thanks for inviting me I enjoyed it on Hacks on Tap thank you bye man thank you Before we go, consider this.

54:20David Axelrod:A U.S. 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 and towns most people can't find on a map, shaking hands in living rooms in Des Moines, eating bratwurst to county fairs in Wisconsin, and kissing babies in church parking lots in South Carolina.

54:55David Axelrod:Because somewhere in the long history of democratic politics and RIP American democracy, the people who do this for a living figured out that scale doesn't replace intimacy, it depends on it. The national campaign helps make 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-up 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.

55:31David Axelrod:It's a thing that converts the air war into a result. So here's the question for every CEO and CFO 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. 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.

56:11David Axelrod: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 Villar, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, and Ashley Futterman. The Fox Media Podcast Network and The Wisdomist Company.

56:32Seth Matlins:Thanks for listening to this special episode of Create or Destroy, Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins. We'll be back with a new episode of On with Kara Swisher on Monday. The right window treatments change everything. Your sleep, your privacy, the way every room looks and feels. At Blinds.com, we've spent 30 years making it surprisingly simple to get exactly what your home needs. We've covered over 25 million windows and have 50 ,000 five-star reviews to prove we deliver. Whether you DIY it or want a pro to handle everything from measure to install, we have you covered. Real design professionals.

57:03Seth Matlins:Free samples. Zero pressure. Right now, get up to 50 % off with minimum purchase. Plus get a free professional measure at blinds.com. Rules and restrictions apply. Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. I don't know if you knew this, but anyone can get the same premium wireless for$15 a month plan that I've been enjoying. It's not just for celebrities. So do like I did and have one of your assistant's assistants switch you to Mint Mobile today. I'm told it's super easy to do at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of$45 for three month plan equivalent to$15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available.

57:39Seth Matlins:Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com. Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify. They have the tools you need to start and grow your business. From designing a website, to marketing, to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need. There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and Allbirds continue to trust and use them. With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into... Sign up for your$1 per month trial at shopify.com slash special offer.