When White ran for reelection in 1979, says Kennan, "poll after poll showed how much the people of Boston hated him. Using focus groups, we looked deeper. We found that White was hated because he was feared, and that he was feared because he was arrogant, aloof, and all-powerful. Could we change that reality? No. So we turned that perception of the man into our main strategy. David and Scott made a series of brilliant commercials for White, the theme of which was, You probably hate me; I'm arrogant, aloof, and all-powerful. But I know how to make this city work. And he won, by a wide margin. How did he win? Voters hadn't found a 'new' Kevin White. What they found was a context in which they could reconcil their negative for him. And that context happened to be the truth: White was a scary guy who got things done. Once we discovered that, and could communicate it effectively, we broke down consumer resistance. On a certain conceptual level, there is absolutely no difference between Kevin White and cottage cheese."
It is worth taking note of Kennan's last observation, because one of the bricks commonly thrown at consultants like Sawyer is that they package and sell politicians like . . . well, like cottage cheese. Never mind that cottage cheese cannot negotiate nuclear arms limitation treaties. Or that a senatorial candidate cannot be pulled from the supermarket shelves and have a little pineapple added, just for flavor. This argument, when advanced, seems to presuppose that voters vote for candidates the way consumers buy dairy products. They don't. Normally, voters "buy" only once: on election day. Candidates do not grab a secondary market share; they win, or they lose.
Yet criticism does help focus how the media consulting industry has emerged. Last November, well after the unveiling of Sawyer's first national campaign spot for Glenn, a five-minute ad showing the Senator talking plainly (and rather innocuously) about America's need to lift its vision to the future, James Reston wrote a column in The New York Times in which he excoriated Glenn's "image-makers" for trying to wrap the candidate in phony tinsel. "The last thing [Glenn] needs," sneered Reston, "is a lot of P.R. types trying to make him clever rather than true."
His sentiments find sharp echoes in other quarters. In his book Ogilvy on Advertising, advertising guru David Ogilvy, otherwise a big fan of research-oriented campaigning, damns political spots as "totally uncontrolled and flagrantly dishonest" and says, "Perhaps the advertising people who have allowed their talents to be prostituted for this villainy are too naive to understand the complexity of the issues." As an example, he cites Jimmy Carter's TV ads of Campaign '76, in which Carter was portrayed as "an innocent newcomer to politics, with no political organization -- a poor farmer with no money."
Bored with what he calls "cheap-shot criticism," Sawyer is quick to counterpunch.
"First of all," he says, "the Reston piece is idiocy because it completely misses the point. We aren't trying to 'make' John Glenn into something he isn't. Glenn's been managing his own image for a long time, thank you, and it would be presumptuous of us to think we could change it overnight. Our job is to take what Glenn is -- a decent, intelligent, middle-of-the-road Democrat with a hero's past and a pretty good vision of the future -- and put that across to the public in the most effective way possible. If I didn't basically like Glenn and what he stands for, I wouldn't -- and couldn't -- work for him. That's what a lot of people outside the business don't understand. They think we approach clients like laundry products. I wish it were that simple, but it isn't.
"Second," he continues,"I think Ogilvy's stuff is absolute bullshit. It's no wonder politicians stopped using advertising firms to do their paid media. Their idea is, if one type of campaign fails you can always try another one next month. In reality, you've got one shot in this game. If you blow it, boom, you're finished. Carter's ads? I would argue exactly the opposite from Ogilvy. I think they were extraordinarily truthful. In fact, I think the entire Carter Presidency proved he was what they said he was: a political newcomer with no organization and no idea of how to operate in Washington."
Where Sawyer and Ogilvy part company is revealing. Ogilvy feels the "complexity of the issues" makes political advertising villainous and unreal. Sawyer argues that precisely because of those complexities, and the process by which they are unraveled, it is more real. Furthermore, he extends his view well beyond the political arena. Four years ago, he says, he talked to Warner Communications about pulling their marketing research efforts under one roof. "They were marketing their films over here, their video games over there," he says, "and dealing with a lot of products whose success relied on consumer attitudes. But they got totally out of touch with those consumers. They did not assemble any coordinated data bank or do demographic targets for media and promotional marketing -- the kind of things we do all the time in political campaigns. They got greedy and out of touch and lost $500 million on Atari."
Sawyer is adamant on the subject of two-way communication. "Corporations are social entities, just as politicians are," he says, "and like politicians, they have a number of constituencies to answer to. Business has never been so exposed to the harsh light of public view. Companies that wait for crisis situations to worry about their public image are already in trouble."
