They may spend hours behind the scenes discussing the importance of a tie choice or a jacket color, but on camera they dismiss such conversation as demeaning and superficial. Conventional wisdom says that to be seen thinking about such issues at all at a time when you could be thinking about world peace or the climate crisis is to damage your image.

Yet, such issues are also accessible to all. The real question is not whether a candidate thinks about them (duh: of course, they are human) but how they think about them. And use them as communication tools.

By choosing a fragrance ad — the kind everyone has seen and rolled their eyes over — to make a joke, but also a point, by using it as a deceptively funny way in to a more complicated conversation, Ms. Schaefer has shown how effective that can be (of course, she did once run a comedy night at Max Fish, a bar in Lower Manhattan).

The only other candidate in modern times who understood this was Hillary Clinton. After years of complaining about commentators talking about her hairdos, she did an about-face and began to joke about it. She said she wanted to call her memoir of her time as secretary of state “The Scrunchie Chronicles,” and noted that she was the only candidate whose hair would not turn gray in office, because she dyed it.

All of a sudden, everyone could relate.

“Usually when you see a political ad, it’s a montage of stock footage behind a head talking very seriously to the camera,” Ms. Schaefer said. It’s worthy, but also familiar. “Making this was really cathartic.”

This election is one that, by pretty much any measure, is not exactly occurring according to all the old rules. Maybe it’s time we all woke up and smelled the — coffee? roses?

Eau de reality?