Create or Destroy: Reimagining Marketing with Seth Matlins

**Kara Swisher** (0:00)
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 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.

**David Axelrod** (0:40)
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 adjacent parts?

**Seth Matlins** (1:04)
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. Create or Destroy is 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 is 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 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 percent 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.

**SPEAKER_3** (3:00)
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**Kara Swisher** (3:32)
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**SPEAKER_5** (4:15)
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**Seth Matlins** (4:57)
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 Lakoff's context, 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?