A few nights ago, four New York City advertising professionals, two men and two women, met in secret to talk about Russian interference in the 2016 American election. They asked me not to reveal their names.

“We could get fired,” one of them said.

“Not that we know anything top-secret,” another one said.

“Or even anything that isn’t, you know, publicly available.”

“It’s just that, in our industry, anything that’s perceived as political—”

“We work with some corporate clients that might—”

“We could get fired.”

“It’s pretty—”

“Cowardly, maybe, would be the word?”

“Which is part of why we did this project in the first place.”

I am at liberty to disclose the following: we were in a hip high-rise in a semi-hip neighborhood in Queens. There was a sweeping view of Manhattan, a gas fireplace, and a low table strewn with snacks. One of the men had a beard and the other did not; one of the women had bangs and the other did not. They all work at the same Manhattan advertising firm, where they are “creatives,” meaning that they write the ads.

“So, let’s say we come up with a spot for one of our clients,” Bangs said.

“Let’s not use a real example, O.K.?” No Beard said.

“O.K., hypothetically, let’s say we write a sixty-second commercial for shoes,” Bangs said. “We get paid for the work, the client sells some shoes, everyone’s happy. Except it’s still not enough—now we have to make a video about the video we made, and then we submit that video to other people in our industry and ask them to reward us for our brilliance.” These meta-videos are called case studies. Every year, during advertising awards season, which starts with the Webby Awards, in May, and ends with the Clio Awards, in September, ad firms submit case studies to compete in various categories—Best Video Campaign, Best Use of Machine Learning, Best Branded Editorial Experience. “It’s not uncommon to spend more time making the case study than you spend writing the ad itself,” No Bangs said. “It’s insane, but that’s how it works.”

Case studies follow a formula, the group explained. “First, the problem your campaign was trying to solve,” Bangs said. “ ‘Shoes were losing relevance among low-attention-span millennials.’ ”

“ ‘To fix it, we knew we’d have to do something disruptive,’ ” No Beard said.

“ ‘We aligned ourselves with a top-tier influencer, and she posted on Instagram about how much she loved our shoes,’ ” No Bangs said.

“Then you brag about how viral your campaign was,” Beard said. “Title card: ‘Five bajillion impressions on Instagram.’ ”

“And then you brag about how you weren’t just selling a product, you were also changing the world,” No Bangs said.

“ ‘In the end, we didn’t just sell shoes,’ ” Bangs said. “ ‘We also helped women find their voice.’ ”

The co-workers have a group text thread called the Trash Patch, so named “because our texts are full of bizarre emojis and memes and all sorts of garbage.” Amid the memes, they also text each other links to news articles. “She, in particular, is obsessed with reading about how Russian trolls and bots helped get Trump elected,” Beard said, gesturing toward Bangs.

“I would say ‘extremely knowledgeable,’ ” Bangs said, laughing. “But ‘obsessed’ is also fair. It’s an unbelievable story! Literally, if it was in a book or a movie, I wouldn’t believe it.” Whenever Bangs read a new article about the sophistication of Kremlin-aligned troll farms, or Jeff Sessions’s meetings at the Mayflower Hotel, she texted it to the Trash Patch.

One weekend in October, Beard had an epiphany: what the Russians were accused of doing was not only a unique incursion into American democracy, it was also, at its simplest, a highly effective digital-advertising campaign. He texted the Trash Patch. “Idea: fake Webbys submission from Russia about how they influenced the election,” he wrote. The ad industry wanted to reward the most “impactful” and “disruptive” campaigns of the year; who else had had a more disruptive impact? “These trolls didn’t have huge budgets, and, frankly, a lot of them are pretty shitty at Photoshop,” Beard said. “But you can’t deny the effectiveness.”

“Nobody who knew how marketing works should have been surprised by this result,” a creative said. YouTube

The creatives assembled a team of volunteers to help them make a Web site, ProjectMeddle.org, and a case-study video with swelling string music in the background. “In 2016, Russia was losing relevance among democracy-obsessed Americans,” the voice-over begins. “We started by aligning ourselves with a top-tier influencer as the face of our campaign.” Onscreen, the silhouette of Donald Trump lurches into the frame. Alleged misdeeds by Russian agents were translated into case-study clichés. Hacking John Podesta’s Gmail became “an innovative e-mail strategy.” Disseminating fake news became “Instead of relying on slow-moving traditional news organizations, we simply created our own news coverage.” While writing the script, No Bangs, the copywriter, turned to Bangs, the Russia expert, and asked, “Would you call Paul Manafort a top-tier influencer, or tier-two?” “Definitely tier-two,” Bangs said. The case study’s voice-over continues, “In the end, we didn’t just impact an election. We impacted an entire nation’s faith in democracy.”

Instead of a “fake Webbys submission,” as Beard had initially suggested, the creatives decided to submit the case study for real. If the advertising industry was going to throw itself a series of lavish parties, they figured, then the people in the room—executives from various media companies, TV networks, and the very tech platforms whose integrity had been compromised—should take a break from their back-slapping and Champagne-toasting and reckon, if only for a few moments, with their tremendous power and responsibility. “As an industry, we love taking credit for how influential we are when we do something good,” Bangs said. “ ‘We helped people register to vote.’ ‘We raised money for orphanages.’ ‘Our creativity changed millions of minds.’ O.K., but then those powers fall into the wrong hands, and suddenly it has nothing to do with us.” She argued that the conditions that the ad industry exploits and perpetuates—the six-second attention span, the worship of celebrity, viral hashtags—were the same conditions that helped Trump bloviate his way to the Presidency. “We taught the culture to want everything fun and fast and shiny and cheap,” she went on. “And then we get Trump, and we act shocked.”

“Every marketing professional took one look at those red hats and went, ‘Damn, that’s gonna catch on,’ ” No Bangs said. “Not to mention ‘Make America Great Again’—what an amazing, concise C.T.A.”

“Call to action,” No Beard explained.

“It’s just really solid copywriting,” No Bangs said. “Nobody who knew how marketing works should have been surprised by this result.” Brad Parscale, Trump’s top digital strategist, echoed this sentiment in a statement last July: “The Trump digital campaign used the exact same digital marketing strategies that are used every day by corporate America.”

Late last month, the creatives submitted Project Meddle to the Webby Awards, in the categories of Best Social Media Campaign and Best Digital Campaign. In April, they will find out whether they’re among the nominees. The 2018 elections are coming up, Beard noted, and very few of the loopholes that were exploited in the last election have been closed. “If we get nominated, then they have to play our video at the awards ceremony,” Beard said. “My hope is that, of all the powerful people sitting in that room, at least a few of them go, ‘What am I doing to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again?’ ”