Campaign Spotlight: For Olivari Olive Oil, a Campaign About ‘Little Things’

For Olivari Olive Oil, a Campaign About ‘Little Things’

A scene from a "Detailers" video, part of Olivari olive oil's social media campaign.

Olivari Olive Oil, a brand of one of the world’s largest olive oil producers, has embarked on an ambitious social media campaign to stake a claim in the United States market.

The campaign, which began in February â€" will run for a year, and is by Twofifteen McCann, part of the Interpublic Group â€" entails a communication issued each weekday, ranging from videos to recipes, that celebrates “little things” both directly and indirectly related to Olivari and the campaign’s theme.

Olivari is packaged in Rome, N.Y., by the American arm of the Sovena Group, which is based in Lisbon; Sovena USA also supplies private-label olive oil, as well as GEM, Tri-Fri and Puglia olive oils, to American retailers and food service distributors. Sovena USA introduced Olivari â€" a blend of many Mediterranean oils that it describes as “natural and fresh olive oil, with a fruity and slightly sweet delicate aroma” in the American market in 2009. Although Olivari was initially distributed only in New England, it is now sold nationally at retailers like Walmart, Shop Rite, Stop & Shop and Food Lion. There are four varieties of Olivari: classic, extra virgin, extra virgin organic and extra light.

Tomas Tavares de Almeida, director of marketing for Sovena USA, said the American market generated one-fifth of the Sovena Group’s $1.4 billion in annual global sales. At present, only 5 percent of United States sales come from Olivari, though it generates more profit on a per-unit basis for Sovena than its American private-label brands.

Mr. de Almeida said Olivari “had a good story to tell, but we didn’t know exactly how to tell it.” To do this, it turned to Twofifteen McCann; the Lisbon office of McCann does advertising for another Sovena Group brand, Oliveira da Serra.

Scott Duchon, chief creative officer of San Francisco-based Twofifteen McCann, said the “little things” theme on which the new campaign is based came about because of the “so many little things Sovena does in the olive oil making process. We decided to celebrate that.”

Among the “little things” he said differentiate Olivari from other olive oils are the sustainable planting and fertilizing processes Sovena uses to grow olive trees, the care with which its olives are harvested and processed, its state-of-the-art mills and its pop-up bottle pourer, which was the cooking category winner in the 2011 Product of the Year USA contest.

To communicate these differences, the agency created a new Facebook page for Olivari, which is the home of the campaign’s social media program, “One year of little.” In an introductory letter on the page, Olivari said, “Over the next year we’re going to attempt to earn your friendship. For one year, we are going to celebrate the ‘little things’ in life by offering you a series of gifts. A variety of small, entertaining, informative, rewarding and surprising gifts. It will be a collection of little things, that, we hope, will get you to like us.”

Mr. de Almeida said the campaign was directed at women age 25 to 50 who would like to live more healthfully using a Mediterranean diet and products.

Among the dozens of communications issued so far in the campaign are series of short films that celebrate smaller, lesser-known holidays, like “Thank a Mailman Day,” and small, fleeting moments like waiting for a date. There is a series of documentaries that profile people who take special care in their craft, as Olivari does with its olive oil production, like Kirsten Muenster, a Bay Area jewelry designer. In addition, there are videos and photos for “little recipes” that incorporate Olivari, for example, for bruschetta, vinaigrettes and marinades, as well as “Mr. O” cartoons that so far have celebrated April Fools’ Day and welcomed spring.

All of the campaign’s content resides on Olivari’s Facebook page; depending on the message, it can also be found on Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest. Although much of it is created by Twofifteen McCann, some was commissioned by the agency.

The campaign’s latest initiative starts Monday, when bloggers, selected and paid by Olivari and Twofifteen McCann, will begin blogging about topics relevant to the campaign’s audience. As is the case with the campaign’s daily messaging, not all blog posts will be food-related. The bloggers will be free to use the campaign's existing content as inspiration for posts relevant to their own audiences. Mr. de Almeida said the campaign â€" whose budget is $1.3 million â€" “needed to get legs” and gain momentum before bloggers could participate in it.

He called the campaign “a very risky move, but it has been very good for us. We’ve doubled our U.S. sales in six months and increased distribution by 33 percent. Retailers love to hear about our campaign. It’s a compelling story told in a different way.”

He also said there was a “little scare” that the Olivari campaign could cannibalize sales of other Sovena olive oils in the United States. He said, however, that Sovena’s mission “is to bring olive oil to every person in the world. We don’t care how we do it, though we prefer to do it through a brand. There’s brand loyalty out there.”

Apple Executive Defends Pricing and Contracts in Antitrust Case

Just days after Apple introduced the iPad and opened an e-bookstore, the biggest player in the e-book market, Amazon, changed the way it sold digital titles. Steven P. Jobs took out his iPhone and shot off an e-mail to the Apple executive who had negotiated deals with the publishers.

“Wow, we have really lit the fuse on a powder keg,” Mr. Jobs wrote in the e-mail dated Jan. 30, 2010, to Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet software and services.

The e-mail was brought up as evidence during the second half of Mr. Cue’s testimony in a Manhattan courtroom on Monday, where much of the discussion focused on whether Apple intended to help the publishers raise Amazon’s prices.

Mr. Cue testified Monday that Mr. Jobs’s e-mail was not a memo congratulating him about how Apple’s entry into the e-book market affected Amazon, causing it to switch to a business model called agency pricing, where the publishers, not the retailer, set the price of the books. (In the case of many new releases and best-sellers, the publishers chose to raise prices.) Instead, Mr. Cue said, Mr. Jobs was remarking on the company’s ability to “cause ripples” in the e-book industry, which was then largely dominated by Amazon.

While Mr. Cue conceded that prices of some e-book prices went up as a result of agency pricing, he noted that many titles might not have become available in any digital store at all if Apple had not introduced agency pricing to the market. He said he learned from his meetings with publishers that they were unhappy with Amazon’s uniform $9.99 pricing for e-books and that they were planning to use on new releases a tactic known as windowing â€" delaying the release of a title’s e-book until after the more expensive hardcover had been in stores for a while.

Mr. Cue testified that both he and Mr. Jobs believed that “withholding books is a disaster for any bookstore.”

The Justice Department was not persuaded by this argument. Lawrence Buterman, a Justice Department lawyer, asked Mr. Cue whether he was aware that only 37 e-books had ever been windowed. Mr. Cue said he had no data on the number of e-books that were windowed, but he argued that it was an irrelevant point because the issue was that the publishers could delay sales of e-books.

“The number doesn’t matter,” Mr. Cue said. “What matters is which books. Thirty-seven could be a huge number if it’s the right books.”

Throughout the testimony, Apple’s presentation of e-mails and evidence was notably smooth compared with the government’s. Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. A member of Apple’s legal team was using a MacBook to artfully shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs when needed.

In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time on the screen. One video that Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point. Judge Denise L. Cote of the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York provided some comic relief when she asked whether the government lawyers were using a Mac. The Justice Department said it was a Hewlett-Packard computer.

In its antitrust case brought a year ago, the federal government is trying to cast Apple as the ringmaster that conspired with five big book publishers to raise e-book prices. The publishers have all settled their cases.

On Monday, the Justice Department’s lawyers homed in on a condition in Apple’s contracts with the publishers: the “most favored nation” clause, which required publishers to allow Apple to sell e-books at the same price as the books would be sold in any other store. Apple has said this clause existed to guarantee that Apple customers got the lowest e-book prices. But Mr. Buterman argued that it defeated Amazon’s ability to compete on price, and that it left Amazon with no choice but to switch to the agency model while allowing the publishers to raise prices.

Mr. Cue said he disagreed. He noted that Amazon had 90 percent of the e-book market before Apple entered the game, so it should have had other options.

“Amazon could have negotiated a better deal,” he said. “They had a lot more power.”

Lawyers for Apple and the government spent much of the hearing debating whether the e-mails exchanged between Apple executives and publishers illustrated Apple’s intent to help the publishers force Amazon’s hand. In one e-mail sent to Mr. Jobs, Mr. Cue was reviewing his meeting with the publishers, saying they were interested in solving the “Amazon issue.”

Mr. Cue said he was referring to the publishers’ ability to price books above Amazon’s uniform price of $9.99 in Apple’s iBookstore. Apple had proposed price caps of $12.99 to $14.99 for new releases. But he said this did not refer to enabling the publishers to force Amazon to raise prices, too.

Is Democratic Criticism on N.S.A. Hurting Obama’s Approval Rating?

A series of recent polls show President Obama’s approval rating at about 46 percent on average. This is somewhat lower than it was in late May, when it averaged 48 percent or 49 percent.

Has the shift been caused by the dominant news story of the last two weeks â€" the disclosures about the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance programs? That’s tough to say since presidential approval ratings rarely provide unambiguous interpretations as to cause and effect. Mr. Obama received a series of mediocre approval numbers toward the very end of May, after we wrote our last story about his approval ratings, but before the N.S.A. disclosures. It’s possible that the cumulative effect of stories like the White House’s handing of the attacks on Benghazi, Libya, and the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of conservative groups was weighing some on Mr. Obama’s numbers. It’s possible that the consumer mood about the economy, which has been on an upswing in recent months and may have helped Mr. Obama to stave off an approval-rating decline, has become slightly les chipper. And it’s possible that some or much of this is just statistical noise.

Nevertheless, I want to correct an assertion that I made a week ago. Here’s what I wrote at that time:

[B]ecause they create as many fractures across the parties as between them, the recent N.S.A. disclosures might not have all that much effect, for instance, on Mr. Obama’s approval ratings.

I’m less concerned about the outcome of my “prediction” on Mr. Obama’s approval ratings than about my reasoning behind it. My claim that if an issue divides awkwardly across the partisan spectrum, a president may be protected from a decline in his approval ratings. I think my point may have been quite wrong.

Consider, for instance, the past episodes (apart from the economy) that did the most damage to Mr. Obama’s political standing. The health care debate in late 2009 and early 2010 was one of them, as was the debt ceiling debate in the summer of 2011.

What was noteworthy about each of those cases was that Mr. Obama received plenty of disagreement from his fellow Democrats. In advance of the health care bill’s passage, Democrats in Congress argued continuously about the parameters of the legislation. And in the fight over the debt ceiling, many Democratic commentators argued that Mr. Obama had given too much away to the Republicans.

Some of the issue, obviously, is that some Democrats may come to disapprove of Mr. Obama’s performance, directly lowering his overall approval rating. As the chart below suggests, however, Mr. Obama’s approval rating among Democrats has remained very high throughout his tenure in office. It has also been quite steady. You can certainly see some downward impact among Democrats in the period coinciding with the health care and the debt ceiling debates, but during these periods, there was a larger downturn in Mr. Obama’s numbers among independents.

To put some specific numbers around this: performing a regression of Mr. Obama’s weekly approval rating among Democrats as a function of his overall approval rating finds that for every one-point shift in his overall rating, his rating among Democrats moves by six-tenths of a point, meaning that Democrats are about 40 percent less sensitive than voters as a whole. Conversely, Mr. Obama’s approval rating among independents is 7 percent more sensitive than his numbers as a whole.

Some of this is an artifact of how approval-rating polls require a binary choice among voters, when voters may have varying degrees of approval or disapproval for a president’s performance. When a Democrat hears some unfavorable story about Mr. Obama, he or she may go from strongly approving his performance to approving it with more qualifications. When an independent hears the same news, he or she may go from qualified approval of Mr. Obama to qualified disapproval instead.

But there may also be a more subtle effect. Most voters do not have the time or the inclination to follow politics on a daily basis, especially outside of campaign periods. Instead, they may use some quick-and-dirty methods to evaluate how a president is performing.

Independents, for instance, generally follow political news less closely than Democratic or Republican partisans do. When a voter like this sees Republicans on television criticizing the president, and Democrats praising or defending him, he or she may assume that the issue reflects a garden-variety partisan squabble â€" and may not be swayed very much by either side’s arguments, regardless of their substance. After all, Democrats are almost always defending Mr. Obama and Republicans are almost always criticizing him, and whether the debate that particular day revolves around the economy, foreign policy or the I.R.S. scandal may not register all that much.

But when some Democratic partisans begin to criticize the president, that same voter may notice that something unusual has happened, and conclude that the president must have done something objectionable.

Couldn’t this be counterbalanced if Republican partisans were praising Mr. Obama at the same time that Democrats were criticizing him? In theory this could occur, but that’s not really what we’ve seen in the N.S.A. debate, even though most Republicans in Congress voted for the programs. Instead, Republican leaders have taken ambiguous stances on the issue in the news media, avoiding the controversy or defending the policies, if not Mr. Obama’s role in executing them.

So what our low-information voter might witness is a vigorous debate among Democrats about the N.S.A.’s programs and how they reflect upon Mr. Obama, while Republicans are largely staying quiet on the issue. This may reflect more negatively on Mr. Obama than if the representatives of the two parties were arguing with one another as usual.

It would be hard to prove that this is exactly what is happening with Mr. Obama’s approval ratings right now. As I mentioned, it’s not exactly clear what’s behind the recent decline in his numbers, and the decline is small enough that statistical variation could also be a factor.

But I believe I was incorrect to assert that the intraparty divides on domestic surveillance might insulate Mr. Obama from any change in his ratings. Instead, the periods that have shown the most short-term change in Mr. Obama’s numbers have been associated with either intraparty criticism (as in the case of heath care and the debt ceiling) or cross-partisan praise (when some Republicans spoke well of Mr. Obama following the killing of Osama bin Laden or his handling of Hurricane Sandy). Precisely because these instances are unusual, even low-information voters may begin to take notice.

Firebrand for Science, and Big Man on Campus

On TV and the Lecture Circuit, Bill Nye Aims to Change the World

Bill Nye's Battle for Science: The Science Guy has gone from taking on science lessons for children to taking on pundits on cable television on climate change, evolution and science in general.

AMES, Iowa â€" As the car pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks, William Sanford Nye unknotted his trademark bow tie and slipped it off.

Bill Nye (at the opening of a 3-D film) speaks widely on TV and the college circuit.

“This might buy us a couple of minutes,” he said.

Roughly two minutes later, before his drink was ready, he was recognized anyway. Two awed young women approached to ask if he was really Bill Nye the Science Guy. Like more than a dozen other college students who would approach him over the next several hours, they asked if they could take a picture with him. He smiled, took a proffered iPhone, scooched the students in and, in a practiced gesture, stretched out his arm to take a shot of the three of them that you just knew was totally going on Facebook.

Mr. Nye had come to talk to them, and a few thousand of their friends, at Iowa State University. If he were a politician, college students would be his base. Instead, he is something more: a figure from their early days in front of the family TV, a beloved teacher and, more and more these days, a warrior for science. They, in turn, are his fans, his students and his army.

They have gone from watching him explain magnetism and electricity to defending the scientific evidence for climate change, the age of the earth and other issues they have seen polemicized for religious, political and even economic reasons.

He takes on those who would demand that the public schools teach alternative theories of evolution and the origins of the earth â€" most famously, in a video clip from the site BigThink.com that has been viewed some five million times. In it, he flatly tells adult viewers that “if you want to deny evolution and live in your world â€" in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe â€" that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.” In any given week, you’re likely to see Mr. Nye, 57, somewhere on television, calmly countering the arguments made by people like Marc Morano, the former Republican Senate staff member whose industry-funded organization, climatedepot.com, disputes the incresingly well-understood connection between rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and warming. In an exchange several months ago on “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN, Mr. Morano denied that warming is occurring, and scoffed that Mr. Nye’s arguments were “the level of your daily horoscope.”

Mr. Nye quietly rebutted his opponent with the gravity of scientific consensus. “This will be the hottest two decades in recorded history,” he said. “I’ve got to disagree with you.”

Sometimes his advocacy can step out in front of scientific consensus, however. In May, after a monster tornado devastated large parts of Moore, Okla., he took a jab on Twitter at one of that state’s United States senators, James Inhofe, who has written a book calling climate change “the greatest hoax.” He mused: “Has anyone asked Oklahoma Senator Inhofe” about the frequency of such destructive storms? Yet a link between climate change and tornado activity has not been established.

On the night the tornado hit Moore, Mr. Nye explained to Mr. Morgan that “you can’t say from any one storm that ‘this is a result of, let’s say, climate change.’ ” But he noted that “if there’s more heat driving the storm, then there’s going to be more tornadoes,” and added that the question “is worth investigating.” Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, said that he considered Mr. Nye “among my best friends” and complimented him for “hitting controversial topics head on.”

But, he said, his own style is a bit less confrontational: “I’m looking to stimulate curiosity so most people can go out there and learn on their own.”

Phil Plait, the creator of the Bad Astronomy blog at Slate.com and a fierce advocate himself, is more like Mr. Nye, willing to take the gloves off in rebutting those who might deny that men landed on the moon, or the evidence for human effects on climate change.

Mr. Plait said admiringly of Mr. Nye, “He will very calmly tear them apart,” adding, “His big advantage is, he’s right. We know that climate change is real. We know creationism is wrong. These are no longer scientific controversies.”

“When people call these ‘controversial topics,’ that’s misleading,” he continued. “They are only controversial politically. And politics is not necessarily evidence-based.”

There was nothing in Mr. Nye’s early days that suggested he might be a firebrand for science. Born in Washington, D.C., he studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, where he got to know a professor named Carl Sagan. He moved out West to do engineering for Boeing, where he spent some three years designing a hydraulic tube for the 747 that served to dampen vibration in the steering mechanism. He refers to it lovingly as “my tube.”

He tried his hand at stand-up comedy â€" his first time onstage was during a Steve Martin look-alike competition, which he won. He would achieve escape velocity from Boeing with an idea for a television program that would teach science to children in a wacky way. The best-known version of “Bill Nye the Science Guy” ran from 1992 to 1996, and won 18 Emmys in five years.

Mr. Nye’s past teaching and present crusading have made him a rock star for scientifically inclined students across the country. That celebrity has allowed him, as executive director of the Planetary Society, to push for the kind of interplanetary exploration that, he said in an interview, “leads to the reverence that we have for our place in the cosmos.”

“Space,” he added, “brings out the best in us.”

Firebrand for Science, and Big Man on Campus

On TV and the Lecture Circuit, Bill Nye Aims to Change the World

Bill Nye's Battle for Science: The Science Guy has gone from taking on science lessons for children to taking on pundits on cable television on climate change, evolution and science in general.

AMES, Iowa â€" As the car pulled into the parking lot of a Starbucks, William Sanford Nye unknotted his trademark bow tie and slipped it off.

Bill Nye (at the opening of a 3-D film) speaks widely on TV and the college circuit.

“This might buy us a couple of minutes,” he said.

Roughly two minutes later, before his drink was ready, he was recognized anyway. Two awed young women approached to ask if he was really Bill Nye the Science Guy. Like more than a dozen other college students who would approach him over the next several hours, they asked if they could take a picture with him. He smiled, took a proffered iPhone, scooched the students in and, in a practiced gesture, stretched out his arm to take a shot of the three of them that you just knew was totally going on Facebook.

Mr. Nye had come to talk to them, and a few thousand of their friends, at Iowa State University. If he were a politician, college students would be his base. Instead, he is something more: a figure from their early days in front of the family TV, a beloved teacher and, more and more these days, a warrior for science. They, in turn, are his fans, his students and his army.

They have gone from watching him explain magnetism and electricity to defending the scientific evidence for climate change, the age of the earth and other issues they have seen polemicized for religious, political and even economic reasons.

He takes on those who would demand that the public schools teach alternative theories of evolution and the origins of the earth â€" most famously, in a video clip from the site BigThink.com that has been viewed some five million times. In it, he flatly tells adult viewers that “if you want to deny evolution and live in your world â€" in your world that’s completely inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe â€" that’s fine. But don’t make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers for the future.” In any given week, you’re likely to see Mr. Nye, 57, somewhere on television, calmly countering the arguments made by people like Marc Morano, the former Republican Senate staff member whose industry-funded organization, climatedepot.com, disputes the incresingly well-understood connection between rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and warming. In an exchange several months ago on “Piers Morgan Tonight” on CNN, Mr. Morano denied that warming is occurring, and scoffed that Mr. Nye’s arguments were “the level of your daily horoscope.”

Mr. Nye quietly rebutted his opponent with the gravity of scientific consensus. “This will be the hottest two decades in recorded history,” he said. “I’ve got to disagree with you.”

Sometimes his advocacy can step out in front of scientific consensus, however. In May, after a monster tornado devastated large parts of Moore, Okla., he took a jab on Twitter at one of that state’s United States senators, James Inhofe, who has written a book calling climate change “the greatest hoax.” He mused: “Has anyone asked Oklahoma Senator Inhofe” about the frequency of such destructive storms? Yet a link between climate change and tornado activity has not been established.

On the night the tornado hit Moore, Mr. Nye explained to Mr. Morgan that “you can’t say from any one storm that ‘this is a result of, let’s say, climate change.’ ” But he noted that “if there’s more heat driving the storm, then there’s going to be more tornadoes,” and added that the question “is worth investigating.” Neil deGrasse Tyson, the director of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History, said that he considered Mr. Nye “among my best friends” and complimented him for “hitting controversial topics head on.”

But, he said, his own style is a bit less confrontational: “I’m looking to stimulate curiosity so most people can go out there and learn on their own.”

Phil Plait, the creator of the Bad Astronomy blog at Slate.com and a fierce advocate himself, is more like Mr. Nye, willing to take the gloves off in rebutting those who might deny that men landed on the moon, or the evidence for human effects on climate change.

Mr. Plait said admiringly of Mr. Nye, “He will very calmly tear them apart,” adding, “His big advantage is, he’s right. We know that climate change is real. We know creationism is wrong. These are no longer scientific controversies.”

“When people call these ‘controversial topics,’ that’s misleading,” he continued. “They are only controversial politically. And politics is not necessarily evidence-based.”

There was nothing in Mr. Nye’s early days that suggested he might be a firebrand for science. Born in Washington, D.C., he studied mechanical engineering at Cornell, where he got to know a professor named Carl Sagan. He moved out West to do engineering for Boeing, where he spent some three years designing a hydraulic tube for the 747 that served to dampen vibration in the steering mechanism. He refers to it lovingly as “my tube.”

He tried his hand at stand-up comedy â€" his first time onstage was during a Steve Martin look-alike competition, which he won. He would achieve escape velocity from Boeing with an idea for a television program that would teach science to children in a wacky way. The best-known version of “Bill Nye the Science Guy” ran from 1992 to 1996, and won 18 Emmys in five years.

Mr. Nye’s past teaching and present crusading have made him a rock star for scientifically inclined students across the country. That celebrity has allowed him, as executive director of the Planetary Society, to push for the kind of interplanetary exploration that, he said in an interview, “leads to the reverence that we have for our place in the cosmos.”

“Space,” he added, “brings out the best in us.”

In Massachusetts Senate Race, Odds for G.O.P. Upset Are Slim

In early May, when we last checked in on the Massachusetts special election for United States Senate, I noted that while the Republican nominee, Gabriel Gomez, had an outside chance of upsetting the Democrat, Representative Edward J. Markey, the fundamentals ran strongly against an inexperienced candidate in such a blue state. Instead, I wrote, the roughly five-percentage-point deficit that Mr. Gomez had against Mr. Markey in the polls at that time “could also prove to be a high-water mark.”

In fact, Mr. Markey now leads by margins ranging from 7 to 11 percentage points in a series of recent nonpartisan polls. With the vote to be held in just eight days, on June 25, Mr. Gomez’s chances for a victory are even slimmer than before.

How likely is a candidate to overcome a polling deficit in the range of nine percentage points with so little time remaining in the campaign? I searched through our Senate polling database, which covers all November elections for Senate between 1990 and 2012, looking for those candidates who overcame the largest deficit in the polls with 10 days to go in the race. (I limited the search to cases where it was actually possible to construct a polling average rather than relying upon a single poll â€" meaning those where there had been at least two polls in the field late in the race.)

The award for the largest comeback belongs to Paul Coverdell, the Republican candidate in the Georgia election for Senate in 1992. Mr. Coverdell overcame a huge polling deficit to defeat the Democratic incumbent, Wyche Fowler Jr., having trailed him by 24 percentage points with a month remaining in the campaign and by roughly 19 percentage points in the polling average with 10 days to go. However, Mr. Coverdell’s win requires an asterisk of sorts, as Mr. Fowler took the narrow plurality of the vote on Nov. 3, 1992, triggering a runoff that Mr. Coverdell won three weeks later.

Another large comeback in 1992 involved the Republican incumbent from New York, Alfonse M. D’Amato, who trailed the Democratic candidate and state attorney general, Robert Abrams, by nine percentage points in the polls with 10 days remaining. But with Mr. Abrams fighting a series of campaign missteps, Mr. D’Amato held his Senate seat.

In Georgia’s Senate race in 2002, the Republican candidate, Saxby Chambliss, trailed the Democratic incumbent, Max Cleland, by eight percentage points in the polling average with 10 days remaining in the race. But Mr. Chambliss wound up winning by a clear margin, roughly seven percentage points. (It’s possible that this reflected a case of social desirability bias as some voters were reluctant to tell pollsters about their plans to vote against Mr. Cleland, a triple amputee and war hero.)

So such last-minute comebacks are not impossible. But they are unlikely â€" these results are plucked from a database that covers approximately 400 Senate races. From an actuarial perspective â€" based on an analysis of the accuracy of the polling average in each of the several hundred races â€" the probability of winning a race after trailing by nine points with 10 days to go in the campaign is on the order of 5 percent.

All of these results, however, are from general elections in November, and not special elections that are held at odd times of the year. There are some reasons to think that special elections are associated with more uncertainty in the polling. First, special elections often have low turnout. As a rule, the lower the turnout, the higher the probability of a polling error, because the polls are more likely to misidentify who actually shows up to vote.

Second, special elections typically take place within a compressed time window, so voters may be slower to make their decisions and more reactive to developments late in the campaign.

In the Massachusetts special election for Senate in 2010, the Republican candidate, Scott P. Brown, pulled into a one-point lead against the Democrat, Martha Coakley, in a poll with 10 days to go in the race. However, Mr. Brown had trailed Ms. Coakley by margins ranging from 9 to 17 percentage points in polls just a week or so earlier.

In the 2010 race, however, there was at least one important indicator that testified to Mr. Brown’s potential even before he pulled ahead in the polling average. That year, Mr. Brown had raised $15 million in individual contributions as of the special election date, considerably more than Ms. Coakley’s $7.5 million.

This year in Massachusetts, Mr. Gomez reported just $2.1 million in individual contributions as of his June 5 Federal Election Commission report (not counting donations that Mr. Gomez made to his own campaign). That compares unfavorably against Mr. Markey, who had brought in $6.8 million as of the same date.

Our fundamentals-based model, which evaluates the public fund-raising totals along with other factors, like the ideological positions of the candidates relative to the state, would now project Mr. Markey to win the contest by roughly 12 percentage points, not far from the recent polls.

By contrast, the same model would have seen the 2010 race as a tossup by this point in the campaign on the basis of Mr. Brown’s superior fund-raising totals and the national political environment, which had already come to be Republican-leaning. This year, while President Obama’s approval ratings have been under some recent pressure, it is less clear that this has implications for Congressional races. The most recent “generic ballot” polls have shown either a rough tie between the parties in voter preferences for Congress, or Democrats very slightly ahead.

In short, it is difficult but not impossible for a Republican to win a Senate seat in Massachusetts in a normal political environment. And it is difficult but not impossible for a candidate to overcome a nine-point deficit in the polls at this point in the campaign. For a candidate to do both things - when the fundamentals and the polls both point against him â€" is more unlikely still. Although some news accounts had been describing the race as a tossup until recently, Mr. Gomez’s odds of prevailing are remote â€" probably no more than 10 percent even under optimistic assumptions for his campaign.

DreamWorks and Netflix in Deal for New TV Programs

LOS ANGELES â€" DreamWorks Animation, trying to lessen its dependence on the volatile movie business by aggressively expanding into TV programming, has decided to forgo cable television in favor of Netflix.

In a multiyear deal announced early on Monday, DreamWorks Animation will supply a torrent of new episodic TV programs to the Internet streaming service. The partnership calls for 300 hours of original programming, perhaps the biggest commitment yet to bring Hollywood-caliber content to the Web first.

The new programs will be “inspired” by characters from past DreamWorks Animation franchises, which include “Shrek” and “The Croods,” and its upcoming feature films. Series will also come from Classic Media, which the studio bought last year. Classic Media’s holdings include characters like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Lassie, She-Ra and Mr. Magoo.

The agreement is the latest in the hotly competitive market for streaming content, with major services like Netflix, Hulu and Amazon vying to capture viewers who are gravitating to the Web, especially younger ones.

The first of the new DreamWorks Animation programs will appear on Netflix sometime next year. Netflix has exclusive rights to the series in all of the countries in which it operates; it has about 27 million streaming subscribers in the United States.

A DreamWorks Animation spokeswoman declined to provide more details, including financial terms. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the studio’s chief executive, plans to outline his TV strategy in a conference call on Tuesday with analysts and reporters.

DreamWorks Animation had three primary TV options: starting a cable channel of its own, perhaps in partnership with 21st Century Fox, which distributes its movies; teaming with an upstart children’s network like the Hub (or taking it over); or bypassing cable completely and going with Netflix.

Mr. Katzenberg parted ways with HBO in 2011, opting instead to distribute his films and television specials through Netflix. Mr. Katzenberg and Netflix announced this year that a new episodic series called “Turbo: F.A.S.T.” would come to the streaming service in December. (It is based on “Turbo,” a film that arrives in theaters on July 17 and features a speedy snail.)

For Netflix, the DreamWorks Animation programming will help fill a hole left by Nickelodeon. Amid a dispute over terms, Netflix declined earlier this year to renew its contract with Viacom, Nickelodeon’s corporate parent. (Viacom in turn made a deal with Amazon this month for Nickelodeon shows like “Dora the Explorer.”) New films from Disney and Pixar will move to Netflix from Starz in late 2016.

Children are avid streaming consumers, particularly overseas, and cartoons allow the company to pitch itself to parents as a commercial-free alternative to television. Animated shows are also less likely to appear on the pirated-content sites that compete with Netflix for viewers.