Scott Miller is one of the few stars in the political firmament to have made the leap from product advertising to selling candidates for office. When he was working on accounts at McCann-Erickson Worldwide in the late 1970s, Miller won fame for the work he did on several of the more memorable Lite beer and Coca-Cola commercials, including the Clio-winning vignette of Pittsburgh Steeler Mean Joe Greene handing the kid his football jersey in ex change for a Coke. It was, Miller says, the best job in all of advertising. In 1981, at age 36, McCann-Erickson made him creative director. And that, he avers, was the worst.
"It was pure crisis solving," he explains. "I went from making ads that were watched by 220 million people to deciding who got a potted plant in his office. I hated it. I hated the duplication, I hated the compartmentalization, and I hated the hierarchy. One thing I like about working with David is that ideas earn respect around here, not titles. Even David can't decide what to call himself." In 1982, Miller quit McCann and began splitting his time between DHS&A and consulting to an advertising agency in Boston.
Why political filmmaking? It was not the money; Sawyer guesses that Miller could make "six times as much doing Coke commercials." For Miller, it was the realization that there was more to be learned about mass communications than traditional advertising could ever teach him. Having written spots for Sawyer since 1975 ("it was a hobby I came home to after work, like bowling"), he was fascinated by the interconnectedness of research and product. In ad agencies, he says, the bulk of the research went into finding out whether an ad that had already been made was up to standard; creative people labored in the dark. In politics, according to Miller, there may be chaos, but there is soul.
"We're political junkies who deeply believe in the political process," he asserts. "If we weren't at least slightly romantic about what we do, we couldn't live with ourselves. I remember one candidate who was shopping around for a media consultant. He walked into this office and immediately started talking about how he was going to pull the wool over the voters' eyes. In three minutes, he completely screwed himself with us."
What Miller has found in the political arena is no less wondrous than what Ned Kennan discovered years ago. One of his first campaigns was New York Governor Hugh L. Carey's reelection bid in 1978. According to an early poll, says Kennan, 75% of the voters didn't like Carey, because of his stand on capital punishment.
"I read those figures like everyone else did," he says, "and there was a lot of talk around the office about repositioning Carey to respond to public opinion. Something about the numbers bothered me, though. So I ordered some more polling. You know what I found? Forty-nine percent of those 75% who faulted Carey for his stand on capital punishment didn't know whether he was for or against it. They had no idea what his stand was! And you know what that told me? At least half the ones who said they didn't like Carey felt that way, basically, because they simply didn't like Carey. They thought he was a schmuck. The only reason they tied those feelings to the capital-punishment issue was because some pollster had asked them. And because it sounds much more respectable to say, 'Sure, I don't like the guy's stand on the death penalty' than to say, 'I just don't like the son of a bitch!"
Like Kennan, Miller is a key part of the team concept that Sawyer started putting together in earnest after the 1978 elections. Prior to that, DHS&A had functioned more as a one-man operation, with personnel recruited as they were needed for specific campaigns. Too many campaigns and too few results in '78, however, convinced Sawyer that a more integrated "think tank" model was the way for him to go. He was not looking for soap sellers; he wanted seasoned political operatives who could function independently within the DHS&A umbrella and, when necessary, float from campaign to campaign.
Joel McCleary arrived at Sawyer's doorstep from the ashes of the 1980 Carter campaign. McCleary, now 35, had already been treasurer of the Democratic National Committee, White House deputy assistant for political affairs, and head of the Carter reelection campaign in New York State. Since joining DHS&A, he has been largely responsible for expanding the firm's international accounts. He, too, champions the expanded-team concept.
"Even if we're not involved in a particular project," says McCleary, "we're all constantly throwing ideas at one another. We try to keep the company structured so we can stay totally involved in the campaigns themselves -- not spend 15 minutes on one here and 15 minutes on another over there. These things move at incredible speed. Two weeks before an election we might be polling every day and cutting spots every other day. We can't always afford long analyses. If our client loses a point by Saturday night, we have to devise a strategy to get back two points Tuesday."
McCleary concedes that international waters can be trickier to navigate in. Unlike the domestic market, political ideology is not a big selling tool. What sells is experience, diplomacy, and persistence. Written contracts mean little ("It's like a Wall Street trading floor," he says. "You operate on trust, plus a lot of accounts receivable"); a firm might sink $50,000 to $100,000 into courting a client without success. For these reasons, few take the plunge: Besides Sawyer, the three most visibly doing so are Napolitan, Robert Squier, and David Garth.
Domestic races, in fact, occupy only about half of DHS&A's agenda. Overseas, Sawyer and his lieutenants have hired aboard campaigns in Israel, Venezuela, and Nigeria, among others. Controlling the dynamics of the political conversation in this kind of arena is not always so cut and dried. Witness: Last summer, DHS&A sent a team to the Federal Republic of Nigeria to consult and produce spots for the reelection effort of President Alhaji Shehu Shagari. Thanks in part to those spots, in which Shagari was praised as "liked by all Nigerians," their client won by 4.2 million votes. Following this victory, the Nigerian Ministry of Information asked Sawyer to design a program of on-going communications-management services.
