Bill Knapp, a veteran ad maker and media strategist who held senior roles in three Democratic presidential campaigns and was part of the ad team on a third, planned to spend the election at home in Washington working on down-ballot races. Jimmy Siegel, who took a step back nearly 15 years ago from an advertising career in which he dreamed up commercials for Pepsi, Visa and Schwab to write thrillers and make TV ads for politicians, should be preparing for the release of his sixth novel. He was finishing edits when Bloomberg’s team called.

Together, the two men are now the creative heartbeat of the biggest advertising cannonade in presidential history. Before he arrived on the debate stage last week in Las Vegas, Americans were getting to know—and even like—the Mike Bloomberg they met in 30- and 60-second intervals between Jeopardy! questions and spins of the Wheel of Fortune. Behind more than a half-billion dollars in ad spending, the campaign worked better than basically all of Washington imagined it would. It helped vault Bloomberg into second place in some national polls, and into serious contention in Super Tuesday states, presenting him as the competent anti-Trump in places most Democrats had yet to air commercials of their own. Bloomberg’s bet on Bill and Jimmy seemed to be paying.

But then Bloomberg showed up in Vegas. That night, when the pent-up frustrations of his rivals all landed on his chin, Bloomberg shuffled off the stage having failed to match the management avatar they built up over nearly three months on the air. He recovered marginally on the debate stage Wednesday in Charleston, S.C., elbowing Trump while landing an early zinger on Bernie Sanders over reports that Vladimir Putin’s Russia was interfering in the election on his behalf. But the debates have laid bare the chasm between the controlled, even polished Bloomberg that viewers saw during commercial breaks and the stilted, prickly campaigner who took a pounding from Elizabeth Warren.

Interviews with more than a dozen Bloomberg advisors and allies shed light on the personalities and process behind perhaps the most unusual advertising campaign in American political history. If Bloomberg can bounce back on Super Tuesday from his Vegas debacle, he could change the rules of American presidential politics forever. And he’ll owe a big piece of his recovery to Knapp and Siegel, the guys behind his half-billion dollar curtain.

“Bill is an extremely focused, strategic thinker whose ads reflect an enormous amount of political expertise and cut to the chase,” said Howard Wolfson, a top adviser for Bloomberg who oversees the campaign’s sprawling paid media effort. “Jimmy is an immensely creative, gifted storyteller, and he has the ability to sort of really touch the heartstrings with his ads. They work very well together, and their styles are very complementary.”

A big Bloomberg win on Super Tuesday is hard to imagine. Instead, he could help slow Sanders’ delegate march while earning delegates of his own in red states and in the South and positioning himself as the main alternative to the frontrunner. This week, Bloomberg dropped a digital video on Sanders over his weak voting record on guns, after releasing a separate video recently that criticized Sanders for failing to regulate his aggressive online supporters. (Sanders has said he rejects the support of online trolls and harassers). Still, Bloomberg is refraining for now from putting millions of his dollars behind his first TV attack ads against Sanders, which would reach a far larger audience, opting to continue making an affirmative case for his own candidacy.

Yet after all the money and ads on TV, voters were already prepared to want to get to know Bloomberg, and then at the debate enough of them felt like they finally did, and were disappointed. His national polling dipped. His rise slowed in Super Tuesday states. Stories that dig into his many past remarks that seem to clash with the leftward drift of the party he wants to lead have proliferated. Back home, many New Yorkers who came to know him as a capable, even impressive, leader also came to understand—and even accept—some of his faults, performative and otherwise. Under much more intense dissection by national media—and running against higher-caliber opponents—the blitz-the-world ad strategy that worked in New York City and in the runup to the Vegas stage is going to need something more to break through and grab people. If Bloomberg bombs, it may be because the blockbuster producer didn’t take his money and use it to cast a different actor.

Americans watching Bloomberg’s ads meet him in fast-paced, black-and-white pictures as the son of a middle-class bookkeeper. There he is as a boy, his hair mussed as he grips the handles of a bicycle. Viewers learn he worked his way through college after his father died, and then of his rise at an investment bank, his firing at age 39, and how he used the payout to start a company in a one-room office. Knapp, Siegel and their teams sketch out Bloomberg’s next career acts: His stewardship of post-9/11 New York, over images of the smoldering World Trade Center towers, his record expanding health care and his philanthropy that took on powerful foes—Big Coal, Big Tobacco and the National Rifle Association, at times bringing them to heel.

In these ads, Bloomberg isn’t as partisan as everyone else. He’s a mayor, not a legislator; a self-funder, not a favor-trader; a unifier, not a disruptor; a doer, not a talker. And he’s content to spend his money torching Trump as the carnival barker who never intended to keep his promises. The ads create the illusion that the two billionaires are marching inevitably toward a November clash. Even the dizzying number of ads, or “throw-weight,” as advisers put it, is designed to convey unmatched strength. “The sheer volume of ads I think says something to people,” Siegel said, “which is he’s going to have enough, and do enough, to take on Trump.”

Bloomberg has achieved an incredible 444,156 ad airings since his November entry in the 2020 presidential campaign, according to a new analysis by the Wesleyan Media Project, compared with 60,467 for Sanders and nearly 15,700 for Biden. Over the same amount of time in 2016, Hillary Clinton had just over 50,000 ad airings and Sanders had nearly 52,000. To give a sense of the scale this year, Bloomberg’s total is more than Clinton aired (402,344) over the entire 2016 cycle, and rapidly approaching what Obama aired in 2016 (560,736) and 2008 (549,451). Trump had 120,908 ad airings in all of 2016.

Through Thursday, Bloomberg spent nearly $540 million of his own fortune on campaign commercials alone, including $100 million on digital ads, according to Advertising Analytics, a firm that tracks political ad spending. Earlier this month, after running for just over two months, Bloomberg became the highest-spending candidate of all time when he rolled past Barack Obama’s $338 million spent on traditional media in the 2012 reelection. Nobody, not even fellow billionaire Tom Steyer and his $186 million, comes close. Bernie Sanders, who is next in line in spending behind Bloomberg and Steyer, has spent less than $50 million on all his ads. Joe Biden, the frontrunner for most of last year, has spent just $14 million.

Bloomberg has worked to portray Trump as everything he is not: a trust-fund kid who inherited his business career and wouldn’t know a charity if he crashed into one with his golf cart. In the ads, Trump is a liar who mocks military officials, is ignorant about the threat of climate change and just wants to sow division for his own gain. But the ads go after the president’s policies, too. On health care, they rake him for promising to protect pre-existing conditions and then trying to repeal Obamacare.

Beginning in January, Bloomberg dropped a whopping $42 million on TV behind a separate ad called “He’ll Get It Done,” the single-biggest broadcast buy of the campaign. It begins with Trump calling the Affordable Care Act a “total disaster” and suggesting he wants to “let Obamacare implode.” A nurse practitioner from New York vouches for Bloomberg’s record: He helped lower the number of uninsured in the city, and he expanded coverage for kids and increased life expectancy. He did it as mayor, the nurse says. He’ll get it done as president.

Democrats see utility in the Bloomberg ads, if not his candidacy.

“I think he’s just laying out the case against President Trump and I think he’s doing it very effectively,” said Sen. Debbie Stabenow of Michigan, who like everyone else has been subjected to the ubiquitous Bloomberg spots. Stabenow singled out the hits on health care for containing messages that she believes will be helpful to her Senate colleague, Gary Peters, and other down-ballot Democrats in her state. “He’s running ads on really important issues,” she said. “He’s making it clear that he certainly knows how to beat Trump.”

Bloomberg’s campaign has produced scores of broadcast, cable and Web ads and videos, but they leave a large amount on the cutting-room floor. As part of a process helmed by Wolfson, they hold daily meetings to develop a strategic direction and give a creative brief. The ad-making team led by Knapp and Siegel returns with possible scripts and creates ads from them. Proposed spots go through a testing battery described as part science, including polling and some focus grouping, and part alchemy. Along with Wolfson, Knapp and Siegel, the pollsters Doug Schoen and Jefrey Pollock are in on the process, as are strategists Leah Marcus, Brandon Davis, Kate Kochman and Mackey Reed. Knapp’s creative and editing team in Washington is anchored by Matt Herath, who has been with Bloomberg since 2001, and Christina Worthington. The decision on what ads to run rests with Wolfson, before the spots are shown to top Bloomberg confidants Kevin Sheekey, the campaign manager, and Patti Harris, the chair. They then go to Bloomberg who watches the finished products and gives his blessing.

In a recent survey for Yahoo News by YouGov, 68 percent of the respondents said they’d seen a Bloomberg ad, compared with 40 percent for Sanders, 38 percent for Biden and 34 percent for Steyer. No other candidate hit 30 percent. Along with improving recognition of the candidate, the constant commercials have helped move people to contemplate Bloomberg as a potential president, or, in political strategist parlance, to get him into the “considered set.” “The ads are very creative. They are really good,” said Bob Shrum, the former Democratic consultant. “But we’ve never had good ads by this kind of megatonnage multiplied.”

“I am skeptical there’s a saturation point,” Shrum added, trailing off to recall a Senate race in 1986 where his candidate was on the air from the end of the primary until November. “Some people would probably say that was my occupational bias in my former incarnation.”

In yet more ads, Knapp and Siegel pitch Bloomberg as the gun lobby’s biggest nightmare. The gun-control groups he founded, including Everytown for Gun Safety, aren’t clearly identifiable to the average voter as part of his portfolio, and the ads are designed to fix that. One digital ad opens with Trump erroneously claiming he’s taken up new gun safety efforts while it lists every school shooting over ambient sounds of a near-empty playground. “Donald Trump says he wants gun safety,” reads text on the screen. “So why has he consistently sided with the NRA. So why did the NRA spend $30 million to elect him. So why do 21 kids get shot in America every day?”

The pollster and consultant Frank Luntz, who helped advise Bloomberg in 2001, referred to the video as probably the most powerful and emotional ad of the election cycle so far. He pointed to dial tests among ad-watchers that found it registering an exceptionally positive response. “Democrats dial it in the 80s” Luntz told me. “That puts it among the top 3 percent of all ads.”

The massive spend is backed by scores of digital ads and videos casting Trump as an aberration. No one has ever spent money like this—more than $60 million in California, $50 million in Texas, and double digits in North Carolina and Minnesota. He’s seen his support rise in polls, from Virginia to Oklahoma. But there are early warnings: Bloomberg continues to lag Sanders and others in the largest delegate mines—California and Texas—where he’s spent the most.

There also have been awkward moments. A heavily rotated broadcast ad featuring a glowing review of Bloomberg from Obama—a spot some Democratic ad makers and observers outside the campaign saw as one of his better offerings—was criticized by Joe Biden and Obama confidants as misleading because Bloomberg was never close to the former president, who endorsed his opponents. (Bloomberg aired at least two other variations of Obama ads in English and Spanish).

Bloomberg’s exact financial arrangement with his ad makers is unclear, but self-funding candidates typically don’t pay the usual commissions (a percentage of the ad buy) and rely instead on retainers or other prenegotiated rates to compensate ad makers. Bloomberg’s ad buying is performed by another firm. For their work, including production costs, Knapp’s newly created consulting firm, MRB4USA LLC, billed Bloomberg over $4 million though January, while Siegel Strategies was paid about $2.2 million in that time.

“I’m not a hired hand to him,” Knapp told me between the two debates, reflecting on his two-decade-long relationship with Bloomberg. At a moment’s notice last year, he picked up and moved to New York for this campaign. “I’m someone who really believes in him and what he stands for.”

During his first run for mayor, Bloomberg launched his unlikely campaign not at a news conference or in an exclusive interview, but in a 60-second TV ad on local stations where he spoke directly into the camera. Bloomberg originally said of that campaign that he didn’t expect to spend more than $30 million, reasoning that “at some point, you start to look obscene.” He spent $73 million. Democrat Mark Green, the public advocate who ran against him, brushed aside Bloomberg’s candidacy as “nothing.” “The chance that a novice Republican billionaire will be or should be the mayor of New York City is equal to the probability that I’ll be the chairman of Microsoft,” Green said at the time.

Knapp created the ads that are widely credited—along with the black swan of 9/11—with elevating Bloomberg and sinking Green. One featured a range of voices, including prominent Democrats like Chuck Schumer, validating that they preferred Bloomberg, who was a Republican at the time. A researcher helping out with the campaign who looked at the ad told officials they should run it until the tape wore thin.

Another effective spot captured the endorsement of outgoing Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who over the course of 60 seconds acknowledged to New Yorkers that they “may not have always agreed with me, but I gave it my all. I love this city, and I’m confident it will be in good hands with Mike Bloomberg.”

But it was Knapp’s devastating piece on Green that Luntz would later cite as the difference-maker. In it, Knapp clipped Green’s comments from a local station in which he said that if he been mayor during Sept. 11, “I would have done as well or better than Rudy Giuliani.” The sole commentary added by Bloomberg’s campaign was a single word on the screen: “Really?”

Luntz said some New Yorkers in focus groups believed the ad was Green’s, not Bloomberg’s. “They were offended that he would be so arrogant as to say that he could do a better job than Rudy Giuliani,” he recalled to Chris Matthews in an election recap. “And that’s what crystallized for them that they didn’t want politics as usual; they didn't want someone with 20 years of government experience; they would rather have a novice who was an economic expert.”

Knapp’s friends and others in the industry eventually amble to the same set of points about his work: He’s a top strategist, who hits the most effective messages in ads, but his product isn’t flashy. Nor is he. “You’ll never see Bill on TV,” said Shrum, who worked with Knapp on Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign, and was a longtime fixture on the Sunday shows.

A New York native, Knapp went to work on campaigns after college, including former New York Congresswoman Liz Holtzman’s Senate campaign in 1980. He moved to Washington and worked for a TV news outlet that fed stories to local stations around the country like WPIX in New York. The late Bob Squier and his partner at the time, Carter Eskew, pulled Knapp back into politics and he went on to work for Bill Clinton, Gore and John Kerry. Knapp joined Obama’s campaign in the general election of 2008 to make ads. He served on all three of Bloomberg’s mayoral races. Last year, Knapp took a leave from his firm, SKDKnickerbocker (he’s the first “K”), which is doing work for Biden, to rejoin Bloomberg’s quixotic potlatch in Manhattan, where the Times Square headquarters is teeming with hundreds of well-paid aides and everyone gets three square meals a day.

As vice chairman at BBDO, the global ad agency that began in the 1890s in New York, and where he started as a junior copywriter in 1979, Siegel made so many Super Bowl ads (seven in total) that he once wrote a first-person piece for Ad Age about what it takes. His answer: Other than pies in the face, sexual double-entendres and things with fur, there’s no one secret to success. “In general, though, you want to avoid anything that forces viewers to think too much,” he said. His approach to political ads similarly focuses on emotional connection. Siegel then stepped away from Madison Avenue to write thrillers, including Derailed, which became a 2005 movie starring Jennifer Aniston and Clive Owen. The latest, called Safe and written under the pseudonym S.K. Barnett, is scheduled for release in June, a week after Washington, D.C., holds its presidential primary.

Siegel, a native of the Stuyvesant Town development on the East Side of Manhattan, got to know Wolfson during Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. Another colleague from that race noted how Siegel loves to build an ad around a last line that has a twist. “Night Shift” was an ode to working-class people who felt underpaid and overlooked—except by Hillary, who had a plan for them. The closing scene showed her working the phone late at a desk. “She understands. She’s worked the night shift, too.”

“There are lots of people I know who say: ‘If I were running for office and I could have only one ad, who would I want to make it? That person is Jimmy Siegel,’ because the ads are that good,” said Pollock, a Bloomberg pollster who has worked with Siegel on other campaigns.

Siegel’s big late-career break came at a wine-drenched fundraiser for then-New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer. With his thick New York accent and disarming manner, Siegel walked up and pitched Spitzer cold on making ads for the 2006 New York gubernatorial race. Facing nominal opposition, and with Siegel offering his services for free, Spitzer took a chance after looking over his reel. Siegel had always been obsessed with politics, and he saw a chance to present Spitzer, whose intense style intimidated legal adversaries, in a new light. They settled on “passion” as a theme, coming off the dispassionate tenure of George Pataki.

“I’ve always believed that ads need to touch you in some way—not just give you information but do it in a way that touches some buttons, whether it makes you sad, angry, frustrated, happy, inspired,” Siegel said. “I’m always trying to impart some emotion to the viewer to get them to want to watch the spot again because, especially now, they have a thousand things they can do.”

The Spitzer ads were so unique they still come up in conversations about politics with New Yorkers. One spot asked viewers there if they remember their state: “The New York that all roads led to? That luminous beacon of hope; that big brash promise of opportunity?” The camera panned around an illuminated Statue of Liberty, skyscrapers, Times Square and Knicks hero Willis Reed. “If you don’t remember that New York, don’t worry, he does,” Siegel’s “Tribute” ad concluded, ending with a shot of Spitzer’s profile. “Bring some passion back to Albany,” reads the text on the screen.

“Other political ads are fungible, are obvious and boring. Jimmy tells stories. And if you go back to the ads he did for his private clients you’ll see the same thing,” Spitzer told me. “He emotes in a way that is unlike any of the traditional ad guys who began with politics and then went to TV.”

Sometimes, Siegel pushed the limits of political ad-making, an amalgam of the kind of work he did in corporate advertising, and TV news. In another spot for Spitzer, Judy Collins sang “This Little Light of Mine” while children play outside. It ended with a very brief overview of Spitzer’s education priorities.

A Democratic consultant who was working other statewide races that year remembers seeing the ad discussed in focus groups because the consultant and their colleagues were such admirers of it. They recalled participants loving it, too, offering their praise one by one. But when asked in the focus groups what the ad made them think about—and what they should do after watching it—several participants drew a blank, they recalled. The message they were hearing was unmistakable: Siegel’s ads from that time were astonishingly beautiful, but not all that effective at moving voters.

Siegel said he’s always been a political junkie, and his early political work like a biographical attorney general ad for Andrew Cuomo, has a decidedly “West Wing” feel. More recent ads hew closer to typical political messages. Rep. David Trone of Maryland, founder of the retail giant Total Wine, hired Siegel to make several ads touching on gun violence, immigration and Trump’s bullying. But in a lighter spot, Trone spent much of the 30 seconds kissing babies.

Bloomberg’s campaign described a collaborative ad-making process and wouldn’t go into detail about who took the lead on what. But the driving force behind some of the spots is obvious: Siegel captured John Mellencamp performing his “Small Town” for an ad about jobs moving to cities and “making small towns ... smaller.” Siegel’s work returned to the Super Bowl this year as part of an $11 million Bloomberg buy about gun violence.

Siegel didn’t know he was shooting another Super Bowl ad when he sat down in Texas with Calandrian Simpson Kemp, whose 20-year-old son, an aspiring professional football player named George, was shot to death in 2013 outside Houston. In the resulting ad, which went deep on Bloomberg’s motivations for stopping gun deaths, she spoke about how no one has a right to take one’s hopes and dreams. Siegel said the one thing he recalls most was Kemp’s quiet dignity. Bloomberg gave his blessing to run it in the big game, telling aides he was deeply moved by the spot.

Ads like that one are how Bloomberg spent his way into second place. Now, in the days leading up to Super Tuesday, the campaign has begun airing spots tailored to local issues. In Utah, they focus on protected lands. It’s health care for Oklahoma, which is rated all the way near the bottom, at No. 47, in an annual ranking of the healthiest places in America. Across the South, Bloomberg has been running ads that focus in detail on his agenda for black Americans, including more investment in African American-owned businesses and plans to increase black home ownership as a way to help build wealth across generations.

For 30 seconds, and sometimes one minute, Bloomberg is once again presented by Bill and Jimmy as the swaggering CEO that he says Trump only plays on TV. He looks in charge—like he’ll “Get it done,” as his slogan promises. Part of the reason the pitch worked for so long was because “it” could mean anything, from health care, to beating Trump, to ending the chaos and restoring normalcy. But on Tuesday, there will finally be hard data—not just record dollars and ratings points, but real votes—that will go a long way toward determining whether Bloomberg ever does more than just pretend to be president on his own first-rate, and very expensive, reality show.