Former President Bill Clinton took the stage as the keynote speaker of the Promax/BDA media conference at the Hilton New York. He led by praising a comment from Bill Gates had made at commencement speech at Harvard. Gates said he had just come out of a meeting about “developing the 13th version of some piece of software” and how excited everyone in the room was. He compared that excitement to the boredom he experienced by a panel that discussed new possibilities for curing Malaria and other diseases. Clinton said the story illustrates the need to convey essential work in more dynamic ways.
— The Power of Branding: “Newt Gingrich was a brilliant brander, he had all his members carry around a little red book – like Mao Tse-Tung had – that had phrases Republicans needed to use to demonize Democrats. They would repeat the same lines and catchphrases over and over. Those lines stuck. He was able to draw a caricature of Democrats and he was able to control the debate.”
— Revisiting Health Care: His failed health plan was not dissimilar from what’s been proposed by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. “My plan didn’t fit the cartoon.” He then goes on to rattle off statistics on how the U.S. health care system poorly compares with the rest of the industrialized world. “It’s important that brands reflect realities and it’s not always easy to do.”
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