From early August through Election Day, Future Majority ran a comprehensive, multi-platform digital voter education & mobilization program focused on reaching, persuading, and turning out registered under-40 voters in nine different battleground states.

Strategy

Geographical strategy

  • Three pick-up states (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania)

  • Three must-defend states (Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire

  • three expansion states (Ohio, Iowa, Florida)

 

Theory of the race

  • Focus on winning back the Rust Belt/”Blue Wall”

  • Defend states that Secretary Hillary Clinton won but needed reinforcement 

  • Expand into other key battlegrounds with significant under-40 voting populations

 

Targeting strategy

The crux of our program centered on identifying the under-40 registered voters in our target states most likely to be persuaded to vote — and to vote for Biden specifically — and then using  publicly available data from the states’ voter files to individually target these voters through a comprehensive, multiplatform digital program across Facebook, YouTube, SnapChat, Programmatic Video & Display, and Connected TV.

 

Content strategy

Plant early seeds: With the chaos of the coronavirus upending Americans’ daily lives and an increasingly saturated political advertising landscape as we approached Election Day, we recognized the need to motivate these voters to vote early. 

Provide actionable information: We also recognized the need for a dedicated voter education component due to the varying rules around absentee, mail and in-person early voting in each state, leading us to create custom voter education landing pages for each state to ensure the voters we reached were given the simplest and easiest possible path to make the early voting plan that was most convenient for them. 

Lead with message, not candidate: Through Future Majority’s extensive polling throughout the 2018 and 2020 cycles, we knew these voters are much more aligned with issues than political parties or specific candidates. As such, our content focused on how the issues they care about most — like healthcare & reproductive freedom, jobs & economic freedom, student debt & personal finances, and the Supreme Court — were all on the ballot in 2020.

 

Creative strategy

Modern digital campaigning requires an integrated, multi-platform creative approach. We tailored our creatives by platform and audience, producing multiple lengths and formats to ensure audiences received the most important piece of our message no matter what screen they were viewing.

Creative

Using polling data and audience insights, we created a wide variety of creative tracks that we ran to different audiences. A sampling of our 30-second creative is shown below, but we created platform-optimized versions of each creative track to better take advantage of 15- and 6-second units, Facebook, Instagram, vertical placements like Snapchat and Instagram stories, and complementary display opportunities using premium publisher inventory and programmatic DSPs.

HEROES. Using a concept driven by comic books and the idea of heroism, we reached audiences interested in reproductive health care with an ad connecting voting to protecting the right to choose. Across platforms, this creative track drove 44% higher video completion rates and 67% more clicks to landing pages from women aged 18-29. 

WE CAN’T WAIT. The economy was our top issue across nearly all states and audiences. We put a millennial spin on it by speaking to the sense of exclusion many younger voters feel. This spot drove our highest blended click-through rate of 0.34%.

FREEDOM. The political right has co-opted the language of freedom. We sought to reclaim it for the progressive left.

 

RUTHLESS. When Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, the race changed in an instant. We leapt on the moment to create an ad that helped our audiences connect one of their top issues—health care—to voting and to Supreme Court nominations. This was our most-clicked creative across all our demographics, driving more than 100,000 unique visitors to our voter education landing pages.

YOUR POWER. When it was announced President Obama would be going out on the campaign trail for the first time in Philadelphia in late October, we quickly produced a spot featuring voiceover from Obama’s DNC speech and activated a “flood the zone” strategy in the Philadelphia market, deploying the spot at high volumes across platforms and on local in-market publishers on the day of. That  Wednesday saw the highest single-day spike in traffic to our Pennsylvania landing page of any day and for any state throughout the cycle. 

NEIGHBORS. Social pressure is a tried and true tactic among political mail campaigns. We sought to extend the concept to a digital execution.

 

HOW IT STARTS. We riffed on the increasingly popular “How it started/How it’s going” meme to connect the act of voting to poll-tested outcomes voters had indicated were top priorities.

CATALYST. For female audiences, reproductive choice was a top issue. We connected activism—a familiar image in the country this summer—to voting and to protection of abortion rights.

HOW THE DUCK. As states grappled with the logistical hurdles of staging elections amid a pandemic, voter confusion became a clear and persistent barrier to participation. We used humor to catch voters’ attention and direct them to state-specific sites that simplified the information around how to vote.

Landing pages

With rampant uncertainty around how to vote, we prioritized landing pages that simplified access to information. We didn’t just tailor each site to state-specific information; we also also changed the content of each site over time as voting options changed. In this way, we ensured voters had easy access to up-to-date and actionable information. We didn’t just want to make sure votes were just safely cast — we wanted to ensure they actually counted.

 

Results

Topline results

Biden won 6 of 9 states where Future Majority invested in under-40 voter education & mobilization, including each of the three “Blue Wall” pick-up states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He also won the three must-defend states of Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Nevada. 

 

Stats at a glance

  • 315M digital ad impressions to under-40 voters across nine battleground states

  • 6.4M under-40 voters reached with our message

  • 49.7x average frequency, or number of times each voter was reached with our ads

  • 1.06M under-40 voters visited our state-specific voter education websites

  • 72M completed digital video views

 

Measurable persuasion

While conventional wisdom is that political advertising has to be heavy-handed and negative in order to persuade and motivate voters, in each of our voter-targeted digital effectiveness surveys among under-40 voters conducted before and after exposure to our ads, our entirely positive and issues-driven creative slate drove: 

  • a 5.2% lift in intent to vote; and 

  • an 11.8% lift in intent to vote for Biden

 

Standout conversion rate

Counter to other organizations running GOTV programs which led voters to over-complicated and generic landing pages, we recognized the need to make unique landing pages customized to each state, giving voters only the information they needed to take the next step in making their voting plan. This approach led to an average 18% on-site conversion rate — where voters took the next action to find more information on how to vote.

 

Early and absentee success

Per actual 2020 in-person early vote & absentee ballot return data, we saw significant cycle-over-cycle increases in early and absentee (EAV) votes from under-40 voters in each state we targeted:

  • 704% avg A18-40 EAV increase cycle-over-cycle in pick-up states (WI, MI, PA)

  • 175% avg A18-40 EAV increase cycle-over-cycle in must-defend states (MN, NV, NH)

  • 65% avg A18-40 EAV increase in expansion states (OH, IA, FL)