On with Kara Swisher - Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

Episode Date: June 18, 2026

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

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. What is the story that holds us together? What is the story that most of us share that allows us to have a sense of community

rather than a sense of, you know, adjacent parts? 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 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'll 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. 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.

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So, David, 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 GOTV effort. First part of the question is I want to talk and get your take about the candidate as brand, right? And how as a political strategist do you think about this? 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 Laykoff's context, you know, frame them as something of a brand, and turn the product that's the candidate into something

more sellable than perhaps they'd be without it. 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, and, you know, he interrupted and so on. And 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, you know, I'm always reluctant to speak of candidates as brands, but there's no doubt that they are. And, you know, the process that I went through with candidates is trying to understand

what their comparative advantages were with the folks who were 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 were always going to be against us, but those people who were persuadable. because you can say 100 things about someone that are all real and authentic, but what are the two or three that are the most meaningful and how do they cohere in a message that people can grasp? And that's the process that I always applied in campaigns.

And certainly that was the case. in the Obama campaign. Who is this Obama you speak of? Well, you know, that's what everybody was asking. At the time, yeah. 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. And it came in a time when the country was deeply, deeply fractured by the Iraq war. And by a sense that Washington was, you know, just 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, 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, and so the first ad, Seth, that I ever did for Barack Obama was in his campaign for the U.S. 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, uh, president of the Harvard Law Review, things he had done in public life where he took on an issue that people thought was unachievable 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 approve this message to say, yes, we can. And yes, we can became the sort of tagline for much of what we did, 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 climate at the time, where people were deeply jaundiced about. 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. Almost seems nostalgic today. So, yes, we can. Yes, we can was, it was both optimistic. And it also was about them and not just us. And what we wanted people to. I'm sorry to interrupt, but when you say, yes, the voter. Yes.

You know, in 2008, I'm always reminded Hillary's slogan was, I'm with her. That was a tagline they used a lot. And his was, yes, we can. 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 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. But 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 woman. 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. It was. We didn't need to remind them.

But the tagline of, yes, we can, made it about everyone, not about him. And it was very positive at a time when people were very down and jaundiced. about what politics was and what it could produce. And so, 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 so we had a solid foundation for the theme. I want to come back to Hillary's campaign in 2008 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 talked about trying to figure out what resonates with whom. Now, about 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 were far more informed about it than I was,

is they all agreed with the premise and 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 pulls everybody in as opposed to what you have to say to pull in this group and this group and this group, all based on identity is a real challenge, right? The Republicans tend to have in America, obviously,

a more cohesive base. 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?

Well, I mean, it's a question of whether you think that the, you know, whether you can assemble piece by piece your base, or whether you emphasize those things 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 as I said, we never emphasized the fact that he was a black candidate that was obvious to everyone. And we really kind of stayed away from a lot of sort of divisive social issues or niche issues 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 usual, rather than this sort of micro-targeting that I think is a flawed way to approach campaign.

And do you think it's that way both at a national campaign and a local campaign and why? I mean, look, primary elections are different than general elections. And, you know, there are different circumstances. And I'm not saying that you should not, you should not, you know, try and appeal to groups of voters who are important in a party or in a, you know, 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 most of us share that allows us to have a sense of community

rather than a sense of, you know, adjacent parts? 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's like nostalgic for 08 when people were divided. Like, that seems like, you know, the halcyon days of division.

Yes, yeah. As opposed to today. Well, I mean, one thing we're fighting, Seth, is we live in an age of social media. We live in an age of big data and algorithms that 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 2008, for example, could actually run against all of that. And because I do think there's a, I think that people, we are sort of oftentimes against our wishes, even our awareness. We are being shoved into silos. But I also think there's a weariness with the kind of siege, mentality of our politics today, the sort of constant battling that we have. And I do, I think, now it could just be that I am a, you know, unapologetic idealist about what democracy can be.

But 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. Or an inhuman algorithm. Sorry, if my bias is showing. Well, yeah, it's not very subtle.

But he, you know, his view of leadership is exactly that you find your community and you animate them by creating straw, and draw everybody outside the circle who's opposed to you in ways that galvanize people. I think that there is every election, I can tell you, I mean, this is my very, very strong feeling based on my experience. Every presidential election, 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 are the deficiencies in the person they have. One of the deficiencies that Donald Trump has that is deeply felt is he is a very, very divisive person. And I think that a candidate who tries to

draw, you know, our draw us together is going to have is going to develop a following. So I think the answer to your question is yes. I think it's possible that especially by making I mean by making

the the algorithms, the social, the algorithms, the social media platforms um, um, a target. for criticism and I think that there are a lot of people who may feel that it's time that we rein some of that in and that we find our common humanity.

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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 will be familiar with, which is, you know, the, the, 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. Yes.

He's against, right? 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 optimist. I'm not sure you said eternal. As an idealist. Idealist, yeah. As an idealist, do you consider, though, yeah, we can be against something too?

Now, you've talked about against the algorithm. Yeah, no, no. Look, I think that there is plenty to be against that doesn't pit you against your neighbor. Right, right. Good distinction. You know, so, I mean, there are forces that should be challenged. You know, we are awash in money that translates into power. 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 all kinds of things that we should be against in the service of reform that is really important if we're going to. going to, if we're going to advance as a country, but pitting ourselves against each other, neighbor against neighbor, you know, you disagree with me. I think you're going to destroy America. I think you're evil. 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 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, and the person who emerges is going to reflect those, those qualities. 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, I used to say back in the day that I had two favorite brands, Santa Claus in 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 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. 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 other societies in the long march of history. And it's reflected, honestly, in our success that, you know, 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 is a place where you can make it and will have the freedom to be. 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 our brand. And there are many other ways in which that is true. I speak, by the way, as the son of a reference. Fugee 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-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, so 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. His election was an affirmation of America at its best, the ability to progress, to self-correct, the idea that really anybody can succeed.

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 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. And I, you know, but I'm not going to, you know, I said I'm an idealist. I'm not a nut.

I understand that we have greatly devalued the American brand. And 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'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 and disease that would ultimately wash up on our shores. Yeah, that's why I think of it less as philand. I mean, obviously there is some philanthropy in it, no doubt, and as they're 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, they're absolutely fucking stupidest denominator and foreign aid is seen as, you know, we're not getting anything back. Well, and it was done. 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. 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 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. That is the philosophy of

Vladimir Putin. And, you know, to the degree that he has bent the, 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. Because people, you know, why are we the default currency and why are we

we, you know, we were viewed as the reliable country, the country, a country that people could count on. Even if we had, they had, They had disagreements with us to operate a certain way. Right. 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. 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. Yeah. 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? 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. Oh, is that right?

And she was the qualitative director for Young and Rubicam. Really? Legend. And, And 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, we, during the presidential races, the second one in particular, you know, Joe 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 have been nearly as rich. campaigns and messaging and campaigns is an art as well as a science. 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. 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. Right, and I'm wondering, and I didn't know that about your mother, and 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 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 kind of, they sanded down the rough edges on Nixon. They put him on laugh and they did some things to make him more, dressed it and ready. Human. Yes. More human for his, for voters.

At the end of the day, they won the race through not so subtle racial appeals, but, which was very much consistent with who Nixon was. Yes. 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, 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 they, what I want them to think about, not just my candidate and the other candidate, but what is the choice about? And I tried to drive those conversations that way, you know, 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 marketing. Yeah, aren't we all? This Father's Day start with a question, like where did Dad's story begin? Ancestry DNA now has up to $75 off on our Father's Day sale, so Dad can explore his roots across more than 3,600 regions and discover the places and cultures that shaped his story. Save now, give Ancestry DNA from only.

$69. Offer ends June 21st. Visit Ancestry.ca for details. Terms apply. Hassam Piker has blown up in recent years. After the 2024 election, the popular leftist Twitch streamer became a go-to voice for the Democratic Party, but Pikers' glow-up has angered

a section of Democrats who are growing louder in voice. Hassan Piker is anti-American, he is bigoted, he's anti-Semitic, and he is deeply massachusetts. So in March, a Democratic group called Third Way published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal's opinion section saying, quote, Democrats are too cozy with Hassan Piker. He is such an extremist that it will only do damage to Democrats and hurt their chances of beating right-wing populism. Now, Piker is controversial, no doubt. But is he toxic? I don't think this helps Republicans at all. I think, as a matter of fact, Third Way's brand of politics has helped Republicans. Their attitudes, their attitude has been to constantly concede on culture or issues to the Republican Party and never focus on economic populism.

I'm a Sted Hearnden, and this is America Actually. Catch us every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. The U.S. and Iran say they've agreed on terms to end the war and reopen the Strait of Hormuz. You already see oil prices from a high of $126 a barrel down to about $80 a barrel today. that's a lot of progress. The war, of course, drove up the price of gas and other essentials and has led to some ugly polling for President Trump. 61% of adults polled by NPR, PBS, and Marist disapprove of his handling of the economy.

His handling in a certain light makes sense. His priority was preventing Iran from getting nukes. But Trump's messaging was unusual, unusual for a president. Last month, the reporter asked Trump, to what extent was he thinking about Americans' finances when he negotiated with Iran? I don't think about American financial situation. I don't think about anybody. What's he doing coming up on today, explained from Vox?

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?

Incrementally. 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. Yeah. 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, 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 I think the product and service, the inhumane, not inhumane, the non-human product and service marketers too often, they're just saying the same effing thing over and over again. Right. and 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. 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 yet.

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 Pluff 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, but there was a core group in my group that involved a pulsar. I did an interesting thing, I think. It was interesting to me anyway, but normally you'd hire a pollster, and that poster would do both the qualitative and quantitative. I hired a polster, 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, 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. And oftentimes in the campaign, it boiled down to Pluff 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, I mean, you've run what and advise something like a hundred, 140, 150 campaigns over the last period of your career. Yeah. You got a story, and let's think at a smaller, smaller than 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. I imagine, I'm not a woman, but like childbirth, you remember the pleasure and you try and forget the pain. Yeah. 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.

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 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 that 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. And you don't have, you don't have, you don't have, 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. 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. 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, atonally 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 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, 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. 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 described your entire career as being at its core about storytelling. I asked if you thought yourself as a marketer, you said, no, a storyteller. Yes. And figuring out what the story of each candidate campaign in the moment. Yes. and then telling it.

I'm wondering what advice as one of the great storytellers of the last decades you have for the CEO, 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. And it's not that attentions are shrinking. The competition is ever expected. 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 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. 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. Last question for you. 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? It doesn't, 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. And I would market them that way. 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. conspiracy theories work. But, you know, I'm just, I'd love to see us have a revolution of common humanity against all of

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. 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 Broughtwurst de County Fares in Wisconsin, and kissing babies in church parking lots in South Carolina. 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 your 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.

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 the store, replace a cure, 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. 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 Valar, Jim Mackle, Manolo Moreno, Brandon McFarlane, Ashley Futterman, with the Fox Media Podcast Network and The Wisdomest Company. Thanks for listening to this special episode of Create or Destroy, reimagining marketing with Seth Matlands. We'll be back with a new episode of On with Caras Swisher on Monday. Support for this show comes from Odu.

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