You didn't hear it from me, but it's a pack of lies anyway.

It looks as if, perhaps, possibly, maybe we have our two Presidential candidates and what has been a 16-month nightmare is finally over. At least the primary nightmare is. The general election nightmare begins presently.

As we watched all three speeches last night, it occurred to Karen and me that in politics today the campaigns are more about what a bum The Other Guy is rather than what a perfect leader Our Guy would be.

I have nothing to base this on, but I’ll bet that an awful lot of people tend to vote against a candidate rather than for one. And with the kind of campaigns that are run, who could blame them?

But what if we in the ad world took the same approach with our work that politicians take with their advertising?

That would mean that instead of looking for an essential truth as the core of our ads, we’d be focused on telling the world how bad the competition is. Rather than sell the positive experience at our hotel client, for example, we’d level some sort of charge against the competition. (“Bedbugs the size of horses! No clean sheets anywhere!”) Or we’d suggest some sort of scurrilous behavior by a key player there. Or better yet, we’d make sure some third-party group not associated with our client took out an ad to throw the mud ― keeping our good name out of it, but slyly making the point anyway.

Think a minute. Doesn’t political advertising kind of make you want to take a shower? Aren’t you glad the rest of the ad world doesn’t work the way the political wing does?

(By the way, somebody told me that a certain hotel in Key West that happens to compete with a client of ours has at least one employee with an extortionist, contortionist, cartoonist or habitual jaywalker in the family somewhere. I'm not saying it's true, but I think the American people have a right to know.)