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The Obama campaign has a lot to teach the advertising community.

1. Simplicity. About 70% of the population thinks the country is going in the wrong direction, hence Obama’s focus on the word «change.» Why didn’t talented politicians like Ms. Clinton and John Edwards consider using this concept?

Based on my experience, in the boardrooms of corporate America «change» is an idea that is too simple to sell. Corporate executives are looking for advertising concepts that are «clever.»

For all the money being spent, corporate executives want something they couldn’t have thought of themselves. Hopefully, something exceedingly clever.

Here is a sampling of slogans from a recent issue of BusinessWeek:

Chicago Graduate School of Business: «Triumph in your moment of truth.»
Darden School of Business: «High touch. High tone. High energy.»
Salesforce.com: «Your future is looking up.»
Zurich: «Because change happenz.»
CDW: «The right technology. Right away.»
Hitachi: «Inspire the next.»
NEC: «Empowered by innovation.»
Deutsche Bank: «A passion to perform.»
SKF: «The power of knowledge engineering.»

Some of these slogans might be clever, some might be inspiring and some might be descriptive of the company’s product line, but none will ever drive the company’s business in the way that «change» drove the Obama campaign. They’re not simple enough.

2. Consistency. What’s wrong with 90% of all advertising? Companies try to «communicate» when they should be trying to «position.»

Mr. Obama’s objective was not to communicate the fact that he was an agent of change. In today’s environment, every politician running for the country’s highest office was presenting him or herself as an agent of change. What Mr. Obama actually did was to repeat the «change» message over and over again, so that potential voters identified Mr. Obama with the concept. In other words, he owns the «change» idea in voters’ minds.

In today’s overcommunicated society, it takes endless repetition to achieve this effect. For a typical consumer brand, that might mean years and years of advertising and hundreds of millions of dollars.

Most companies don’t have the money, don’t have the patience and don’t have the vision to achieve what Mr. Obama did. They jerk from one message to another, hoping for a magic bullet that will energize their brands. That doesn’t work today. That is especially ineffective for a politician because it creates an aura of vacillation and indecisiveness, fatal qualities for someone looking to move up the political ladder.

The only thing that works today is the BMW approach. Consistency, consistency, consistency — over decades, if not longer.

But not with a dull slogan. Hitachi has been «inspiring the next» for as long as I can remember, but with little success.

Effective slogans needs to be simple and grounded in reality. What next has Hitachi ever inspired? Red ink, maybe. In the past 10 years, Hitachi has had sales of $786.9 billion and managed to lose $5.1 billion. When you put your corporate name on everything, as Hitachi does, it’s difficult to make money because it’s difficult to make the brand stand for anything.

3. Relevance. «If you’re losing the battle, shift the battlefield» is an old military axiom that applies equally as well to marketing. By his relentless focus on change, Mr. Obama shifted the political battlefield. He forced his opponents to devote much of their campaign time discussing changes they proposed for the country. And how their changes would differ from the changes that he proposed.

All the talk about «change» distracted both Ms. Clinton and Mr. McCain from talking about their strengths: their track records, their experience and their relationships with world leaders.

As you probably know, Mr. Obama was selected as Advertising Age’s Marketer of the Year by the executives attending the Association of National Advertisers’ annual conference in Orlando last month. But one wonders if these CMOs are getting the message.

As one marketing executive said: «I look at it as something that we can all learn from as marketers. To see what he’s done, to be able to create a social network and do it in a way where it’s created the tools to let people get engaged very easily. It’s very easy for people to participate.»

Whatever happened to «change»?