He is responsible for getting Paul and Jesse elected. Minnesota’s premier political ad consultant is the very best in the business. So why’s Bill Hillsman sitting this one out?
Photos by John Noltner
If American politics were the fount of democratic possibility it’s made out to be, Bill Hillsman would be a very rich man for one simple reason. In the fortysome-year history of media-driven political campaigns, there has been no one else remotely like him, no one who possessed his particular combination of razor-sharp ad skills, an impeccable feel for the spirit of the moment, and a gift for making people talk about his candidate. The media critic at the online mag Slate, Scott Shuger, called Hillsman “the greatest political adman who ever lived,” and by whatever yardstick you choose—the sheer inventiveness of his work, or its overwhelming role in electing not one but two populist longshots to prominent office—there is really no contesting the proposition.
With Paul Wellstone in 1990 and Jesse Ventura in 1998, Hillsman proved it was possible for outsiders to crash the party on a shoestring budget. He did it with ads that were funny and engaging and, most important, plainspoken. Hillsman’s spots, from “Looking for Rudy” to “Jesse the Thinker,” threw away the insular, sloganeering language of conventional political advertising; they made jokes instead, elegant little 30-second jibes that tapped workaday outrage over the tyranny of politics as usual. There’s just one problem with Hillsman’s professional prospects: The national political parties want nothing to do with him. “No,” Hillsman agrees ruefully, “we don’t get asked to play very much. The pollsters are against us because I’ve knocked polling. None of the established consultants have anything good to say about us, for obvious reasons. And the Democratic party…” Hillsman trails off without finishing the thought: The Democratic party machine doesn’t want to deal with any media guy whose specialty is getting the unanointed, insurgent candidate elected. At the end of the day, both major parties would rather lose with the known quantity than win with the unknown. The Rake sat down with Hillsman recently, to get his views on this fall’s races and to talk shop about the art and science of the modern political campaign.
The Rake: Do you agree with the argument Kevin Phillips and others have made recently—that scandals involving wealth and power and politics have reached a critical mass and there’s a sea change in public attitudes taking shape?
Hillsman: I’d like to believe that, but I don’t think I do. One thing that’s happened now because of corporate malfeasance is that a lot of people are hit where it hurts the most. Normally you would expect politicians to react fairly quickly when that happens, especially in an election year. Which is why you saw that legislation passed so quickly. But was the legislation meaningful? It was mainly window dressing. And maybe I’ve just been doing this job for too long, but I think by and large people will buy the window dressing until the next crisis comes.
The Rake: You made your mark in political advertising with Wellstone in 1990. What did you sense about the public mood that made you believe that style of political advertising would work?
Hillsman: It wasn’t so much what we sensed in the public mood. It was more a matter of trying out some theories developed for commercial advertising in the political arena. Paul really had nothing to lose, and he didn’t really know he was being used to try out theories.
The old theory of political advertising, which still holds in Washington even these 12 years later, is that media is nothing more than a commodity—and if you layer it on thick enough, you can convince the public of basically anything. That’s how you wind up with Al Checchi spending $40 million in California, [Jon] Corzine in New Jersey spending $60 million, and Mark Dayton spending $12-14 million in Minnesota, which is equivalent to spending about $60 million in Jersey.
It’s a benighted notion about how you win elections. But Paul’s bought into it in the last two elections—the notion that you have to fight fire with fire and keep pouring on the media so people can’t turn around without seeing a spot. Then the message will somehow invade their consciousness, and they’ll go out like robots and vote for that person.
My counter-theory—and this was out of necessity, really—was something that we started to fool around with in the commercial sector in the early 1980s. Commercial advertising used to be framed by this same view about media, that it was more or less a commodity and the number of ads you ran determined your success. When I first came up in the industry as a copywriter in the mid to late 1970s there was a formula for doing commercial ads. In a 30-second spot, you needed to mention the product name in the first five seconds, you needed to mention it at least three times overall, and you needed to show the package or the logo for the last 3-5 seconds. If you did all those things, you had a successful ad. But all this approach did was telegraph to viewers that they were watching a commercial. And most people don’t like commercials. They try not to watch them. What we decided in the early 1980s was, let’s not telegraph that we’re making a commercial. Let’s keep them in suspense, sometimes for up to 20 seconds. And let’s give the people watching a real payoff. It might be making you laugh, touching some emotion, or giving information that’s genuinely of value to you.
What we proved in the early 1980s, and a lot of it came straight out of Minneapolis, was that if somebody pays attention to your commercial, you don’t have to spend as much on media. And that’s significant because media is the single highest line-item cost in any sort of ad campaign. You’re talking tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases.
That was the theory. And with Wellstone you had to do it that way, because there wasn’t any money. We basically decided to make the entire campaign a media campaign. Paul had already been out there on the stump, and he was in danger of losing the primary to someone who hadn’t campaigned at all. That’s how little interest there was in this guy’s campaign. Rudy Boschwitz, on the other hand, was going to be on the air a lot. So we tried to pre-empt him, to make every Boschwitz ad that came on work against him: “Anytime you see a Boschwitz commercial, it just means he’s trying to buy the election.” That was the positioning for Paul in a nutshell. It was entirely a media campaign and we pulled it off.
The attitude of the spots was different enough that they appealed to a lot of people who hadn’t felt interested or involved in politics since the 60s or early 70s. It brought a lot of progressives out and united a lot of people. It caught the attention of younger people who had pretty much given up on politics. In many respects it was a precursor to the Ventura campaign. It took people that wanted to believe in politics but had been so disappointed they practically gave up.
But none of those people would have voted for him if you had told them that in 12 years he’d be running an $8 million re-election campaign.