Here is a brief excerpt from an interview of Frank Luntz, part of the FRONTLINE series. Since 1983, it has served as American public television’s flagship public affairs series. Hailed upon its debut on PBS as “the last best hope for broadcast documentaries,” FRONTLINE’s stature over 30 seasons is reaffirmed each week through incisive documentaries covering the scope and complexity of the human experience.

When FRONTLINE was born, however, the prospects for television news documentaries looked grim. Pressure was on network news departments to become profitable, and the spirit of outspoken journalistic inquiry established by programs like Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now and Harvest of Shame had given way to entertainment values and feature-filled magazine shows. Therefore, it fell to public television to pick up the torch of public affairs and carry on this well-established broadcast news tradition.

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What are you measuring with the dial technology? [A mechanism Luntz uses whereby people in a focus group register their moment by moment responses to a speech or presentation.]

It’s like an X-ray that gets inside your head, and it picks out every single word, every single phrase [that you hear], and you know what works and what doesn’t. And you do it without the bias of a focus group. People are quiet as they’re listening, and they’re reacting anonymously. The key to dial technology is that it’s immediate, it’s specific, and it’s anonymous.

It’s so immediate, it feels instantaneous.

But it is, because politics is instantaneous. Politics is gut; commercials are gut. You’re watching a great show on TV, you now come to that middle break, you decide in a matter of three seconds whether or not you’re going to a) flip the channel; b) get up; or c) keep watching. It’s not intellectual; it is gut.

Is it the same for political decisions about power companies and politicians, though?

We decide based on how people look; we decide based on how people sound; we decide based on how people are dressed. We decide based on their passion. If I respond to you quietly, the viewer at home is going to have a different reaction than if I respond to you with emotion and with passion and I wave my arms around. Somebody like this is an intellectual; somebody like this is a freak. But that’s how we make up our minds. Look, this is about the real-life decisions of real-life Americans, who to vote for, what to buy, what to agree with, what to think, how to act. This is the way it is.

You think emotions are more revelatory than the intellect for predicting these decisions?

80 percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think. I can change how you think, but how you feel is something deeper and stronger, and it’s something that’s inside you. How you think is on the outside, how you feel is on the inside, so that’s what I need to understand.

And this technology can get at that?

The great thing about dial technology is you can get a small response on the dial, or you can get a huge jump. You watch with your own eyes: At some points, the lines are way up at the top of the screen or even out beyond. People were practically breaking their dials in agreement at certain points, and at other points, they were flat. It measures intensity. And if you want to understand public opinion, if you want to understand public behavior, if you want to understand the way we operate as Americans and as humans, you’ve got to understand that one word: intensity.

It can be anything, then, that you’re selling.

I’m not going to let you twist the words, because if I say to you that you can sell a politician the way you sell soap — and it may even look that way from the outside — that says to Americans that they shouldn’t respect politicians or soap. It really isn’t that way. The way you communicate an idea is different than the way you communicate a product. However, the way you measure [the response of the public in both instances] is quite similar. And the principles behind explaining and educating the product or the elected official is similar, even though the actual execution of it is very, very different.

Are there different techniques you use when working with politics versus corporations?

The technique is a little bit different because politics and corporations are a little bit different. But in the end you’re still using the same focus groups; you’re still using the same dial technology; you’re still using the same quantitative data; you’re still doing split samples where you ask half a sample one way and the other half a different way. You’re still asking and re-asking the questions. You’re still showing them visuals to see what they like the best, and you’re still showing them or having them listen to audio track to see how they respond. So the actual techniques are the same, but how they are applied is different. And that really is the separation; that’s the differentiation between politics and the corporate world.

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To read the complete interview, please click here.

Frank I. Luntz is an American political consultant, pollster, and Republican Party strategist. His most recent work has been with the Fox News Channel as a frequent commentator and analyst, as well as running focus groups after presidential debates. In this interview, he explains what it takes to communicate a message effectively, shares some of the advice that he gives clients, and explains why his testing and field research seeks words that move people to act on an emotional level: “It’s all emotion. But there’s nothing wrong with emotion. When we are in love, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are on vacation, we are not rational; we are emotional. When we are happy, we are not [rational]. In fact, in more cases than not, when we are rational, we’re actually unhappy. Emotion is good; passion is good. Being into what we’re into, provided that it’s a healthy pursuit, it’s a good thing.”

His published works include Words That Work: It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear (2007) and, more recently, Win: The Key Principles to Take Your Business from Ordinary to Extraordinary (2011). This interview was conducted on Dec. 15, 2003.