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John Zoeller

The Persuaders - 11 views

    • John Zoeller
       
      Highlights and notes start below...scroll down
  • At last, they find the building they've been looking for. They line up the target in their sights. What's this covert mission all about? It's a new kind of urban warfare, a sneaker company's all-out battle for our attention.
    • John Zoeller
       
      Recall the discussion about the First Amendment implications related to broadcasting messages on other people's buildings...would projecting on government buildings be protected speech?
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • I set out on a tour through the modern machinery of selling to meet some of the persuaders up close. My first stop, a downtown New York storefront. I've been invited to a hit party, or something that looks like one. What this really is, is the opening salvo in a marketing blitz for a new airline. They call themselves Song. Song is a subsidiary of Delta Airlines, but you won't find any mention of Delta here. Delta is old-fashioned air travel, and Song is their way of persuading us that they can compete with hip, low-cost carriers like Jet Blue.
    • John Zoeller
       
      Song was an attempt to target women: Obama's campaign targeted women, young people, and minorities.  Events and settings were as important as issues.
  • TIM MAPES: She's got three children, a husband. They both work. They have an SUV and a sports car, Nieman-Marcus credit cards, but she shops at Target. She has got a propensity to read kind of high-end literature, but she finds guilty pleasure in People magazine. And she doesn't have an airline.
    • John Zoeller
       
      And she doesn't have a political party or a candidate
  • Andy Spade
  • TIM MAPES: Well, the risk is you invest an inordinate amount of money behind a message that is a fairly ethereal message that, as I say, doesn't feed the bulldog. I mean, this is a business, this isn't an art form. So we have got to ensure that it's communication that drives commerce, not just makes people feel good.
    • John Zoeller
       
      This is where Karl Rove has an answer: metrics--if it can't be measured, it's not worth doing.
  • DOUGLAS RUSHKOFF: The question is an advertising classic: Should the pitch be aimed at the head or the heart? How creative can an ad get and still be an ad?
  • KEVIN ROBERTS: Everything works now. You know, French Fries taste crisp. Coffee's hot. You know, beer tastes good, unless you live in America and then, you know, you've got to live with what you get. But all these things now are table stakes.
  • DOUGLAS ATKIN: I was in a research facility watching eight people rhapsodize about a sneaker. And I thought, "Where is this coming from? This is, at the end of the day, a piece of footwear." But the terms they were using were evangelical. So I thought, if these people are expressing cult-like devotion, then why not study cults? Why not study the original? Find out why people join cults and apply that knowledge to brands
    • John Zoeller
       
      Remember, I'm emphasizing that brand should mean political party to you.
  • KEVIN ROBERTS: You know, we've moved from brands into experiences. Look at Tide, for instance, in the U.S. Tide's no longer a laundry detergent. It's not about getting clothes clean anymore. All detergents get your clothes clean. Tide's about a much deeper – a deeper thing than that. It's an enabler. It's a liberator. It's – I guess you think about moving Tide from the heart of the laundry to the heart of the family.
    • John Zoeller
       
      This was the ad I asked you to place on a specific network and/or show: BET.  What would a political analyst learn from this?
John Zoeller

7.1_3B-McConnell v FEC (Scalia's Opinion) - 0 views

  • Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 (BCRA)
    • John Zoeller
       
      Also known as "McCain-Feingold", after the two Senators, one a Republican, the other a Democrat, the Bi-Partisan Campaign Finance Reform Act amended and extended the Federal Elections Commission Act (FECA). The BCRA did several things: 1) banned unregulated contributions, known as "soft money",to national political parties by special interests or individuals including funds for "party building activities" 2) Changed several provisions regarding the size of permissible contributions 3) Banned unions, corporations, and non-profit corporations from funding broadcast advertisements, called "electioneering communications" within 60 days of a general election or 30 days of a primary; examples include Right to Life or the Environmental Defense Fund, or even an unincorporated entity (a person, presumably) using any corporate or union general treasury funds
  • Buckley v. Valeo, 424 U.S. 1 (1976)
  • Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA)
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • This is a sad day for the freedom of speech
  • a law that cuts to the heart of what the First Amendment is meant to protect: the right to criticize the government
  • It forbids pre-election criticism of incumbents by corporations, even not-for-profit corporations, by use of their general funds; and forbids national-party use of “soft” money to fund “issue ads” that incumbents find so offensive
  • To be sure, the legislation is evenhanded: It similarly prohibits criticism of the candidates who oppose Members of Congress in their reelection bids. But as everyone knows, this is an area in which evenhandedness is not fairness. If all electioneering were evenhandedly prohibited, incumbents would have an enormous advantage
  • if incumbents and challengers are limited to the same quantity of electioneering, incumbents are favored
  • Beyond that, however, the present legislation targets for prohibition certain categories of campaign speech that are particularly harmful to incumbents. Is it accidental, do you think, that incumbents raise about three times as much “hard money”–the sort of funding generally not restricted by this legislation–as do their challengers?
  • I wish to address three fallacious propositions
  • (a)  Money is Not Speech
    • John Zoeller
       
      it is...
  • (b)  Pooling Money is Not Speech
    • John Zoeller
       
      it is...
  • (c) Speech by Corporations Can Be Abridged
    • John Zoeller
       
      it can't...
  • introduce a nonspeech element
  • introduce a nonspeech element
  • As we said in Buckley, 424 U.S., at 16, “this Court has never suggested that the dependence of a communication on the expenditure of money operates itself to introduce a nonspeech element or to reduce the exacting scrutiny required by the First Amendment.”
  • In any economy operated on even the most rudimentary principles of division of labor, effective public communication requires the speaker to make use of the services of others.
  • Division of labor requires a means of mediating exchange, and in a commercial society, that means is supplied by money.
  • This is not to say that any regulation of money is a regulation of speech
  • But where the government singles out money used to fund speech as its legislative object, it is acting against speech as such, no less than if it had targeted the paper on which a book was printed or the trucks that deliver it to the bookstore
  • The constitutional right of association explicated in NAACP v. Alabama, 357 U.S. 449, 460 (1958), stemmed from the Court’s recognition that ‘[e]ffective advocacy of both public and private points of view, particularly controversial ones, is undeniably enhanced by group association
  • Subsequent decisions have made clear that the First and Fourteenth Amendments guarantee ‘ “freedom to associate with others for the common advancement of political beliefs and ideas,” ’ … .” Buckley, supra, at 15.We have said that “implicit in the right to engage in activities protected by the First Amendment” is “a corresponding right to associate with others in pursuit of a wide variety of political, social, economic, educational, religious, and cultural ends
  • In NAACP v. Button, supra, at 428—429, 431, we held that the NAACP could assert First Amendment rights “on its own behalf, . . . though a corporation,”
  • The Court changed course in Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 652 (1990), upholding a state prohibition of an independent corporate expenditure in support of a candidate for state office. I dissented in that case, see id., at 679, and remain of the view that it was error.
  • the organizational form in which those enterprises already exist, and in which they can most quickly and most effectively get their message across, is the corporate form. The First Amendment does not in my view permit the restriction of that political speech. And the same holds true for corporate electoral speech: A candidate should not be insulated from the most effective speech that the major participants in the economy and major incorporated interest groups can generate.
  • dissenting
  • concurring
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