Taking back the Senate

With control of the U.S. Senate on the line in 2020, we worked with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee as well as the campaigns for Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to mobilize key voters in Georgia. While traditional digital turnout programs hammer home dates and voting information to target voters, we knew we couldn’t simply take Georgia’s votes for granted. We developed a motivational ad campaign using the best of our digital persuasion techniques to mobilize voters.

While the debate rages in political circles about whether popular issues or key values are the best messages to use to win over voters, we knew there was no one size fits all messaging approach. We developed 9 different 15-second ad executions to test with key voters and measured the effect of those ads on candidate support and reported motivation to vote. These included messages on raising the minimum wage, honoring the legacy of John Lewis, and free COVID-19 care. We also tested formats like low production value direct-to-camera messages that performed extremely well in the 2020 general election. Our pre-flight creative testing showed that messages reflecting the values and power of black voters in Georgia to shape the national narrative dramatically increased motivation to vote and positively affected support for the Democratic candidates.

In addition to pre-testing our creative, we measured the impact of our top testing ads while they were running to our target audiences. The technology we developed for the 2020 election allowed us to tie exposure to our ads directly to early vote ballots being requested and early votes cast at the individual level. We found that our top testing ads increased Vote by Mail applications in Georgia by 1.3% and increased votes cast by .2% during our test period. Our surveys also helped us discover that our advertising had the highest impact with African American voters in rural and suburban precincts. We were able to direct the rest of our advertising investment to the African American voters that were responding the best, serving them ads that evidence was showing was significantly increasing turnout.

On election night, a major narrative emerged: African American voters in rural and suburban Georgia had shown up in historic numbers to send Senators Warnock and Ossoff to Washington D.C. We were thrilled to have played a small part in that chapter of history.