Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Wendy Clark Appears at a Fortune Magazine Forum, October 2016
Emails released by WikiLeaks have led to the outing of an elaborate scheme to scour, buff and shine the decades of scandals attached to Hillary and Bill Clinton using the marketing, branding and messaging tricks employed by corporations to resuscitate a stale, discredited or sagging brand. We’ve also learned that at least one of those re-branders, Wendy Clark, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement with the Clinton camp, agreeing not to divulge details of her work. Clark acknowledged that agreement at a recent Fortune Magazine forum.
Clark is widely considered a corporate branding genius, having been responsible for the “Share a Coke” campaign at Coca-Cola which featured folksy names on the side of their cans and bottles. In January of 2015, it was reported that Clark was taking a three-month leave of absence from her demanding and high-level position as President of sparkling brands and strategic marketing in North America for the Coca-Cola Company. On April 6, 2015, a week before Hillary Clinton announced that she was a candidate for President, Coca-Cola announced that Clark was returning to her post at the company. (Clark is now CEO at DDB Worldwide, North America, a global advertising agency.)
But emails released by WikiLeaks show that Clark was consulting with the Clinton team before she took her leave from Coca-Cola. In this email dated December 8, 2014, long-time Clinton attorney and adviser Cheryl Mills writes to Clark about polling and branding. Mills indicates that Clark will be playing a major role, writing: “The process memo you are working on for today will help as I assume it will speak generally to the research you would need to do the branding or need to have done with you shaping it.”
In a February 14, 2015 email to a broad swath of corporate marketers, branders and polling experts that were already actively engaged in the Clinton campaign (despite the fact that Clinton had failed to alert the Federal Election Commission that she was conducting a campaign), Clark fleshes out more of her branding strategy. Clark writes:
“In the meeting last week the Secretary seemed to associate with what we had identified: fresh yet familiar, tenacity, resilience, empathy, creativity, action-oriented, future focused.”
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