I'm talking about the pundits cueing up cheek-by-jowl, pixel-to-pixel and podcast-to-podcast on the marketing lessons to be learned from the Kamala Harris phenomena.

Actually, it’s already started, with everyone from Ad Age to CNN giving a trendy nod to the “innovative” way her campaign is "collabing" — a loathsome word — with creators and influencers to energize younger audiences. 

Doubtless this will soon be followed by paeans to everything from “brand strategy in a blink,” to “see, we told you that bit about creative needing time was just whining,” to, god help us, “how to build a brand at Kamala speed.”

Memo to Nov. 6th: if half of this build the plane in mid-air shit works out, I’ll be eternally grateful. Really, really hoping not to have to live on a boat off Montreal for the next four years.

In the meantime, here's a relevant thought: don't stare at the sun and don't bark at the moon.

That’s by way of saying that presidential campaigns are the most singular beasts in the known communications-verse. From white hot intensity to always-on ubiquity to unlimited wells of attention, there is simply nothing that compares.

Of course, there will be those who argue that her stunningly rapid ascent is evidence of how much faster things move these days; more grist for the "technology changes everything" spinmeisters.

In my mind, that’s just another example of what the historian Jon Meacham calls, “the narcissism of the present “— the notion that nothing before could have happened quite this way.

Except that it did. In US history there have been 18 “open” presidential nominating conventions. That means 18 previous presidential nominees had to get a national campaign up and running in about the same time frame as Harris Walz.

Since the last one was 70 years ago, of course, none of them had anything to spread the word beyond newspapers, the US mails, and word of mouth. 

Still, the word, even if not digitally enabled, did spread. At speed.

Seen in that light, the most interesting takeaway from the last — damn, it’s been a whole 39 days, now —isn’t how everything has changed, but how much it hasn’t.

Discredit where due: it was Roger Ailes who saw around corners that nobody knew existed to build Fox News and, in the process, persuaded the world that grievance and outrage and endorphins were better than sex, in selling a product — on air, on a podium, or on the shelves.

Ah the good ol’ days when the commercialization of procreation was widely viewed as advertising’s secret sauce.

But then, as I say, came Roger and Rupert, and the still-running freak show that got us to a point where it seems that being mad, and delulu, and divisive as hell, really did pay.

Now it seems that the light may have faded for a while, but that the ability to persuade based on our better angels is still alive and kicking.

Just take the right stars to align, the right person, and the absolutely unique right circumstances.