NYC Mayor’s Race
Goal
The Center for Civic Progress looked to Relation to turn out moderate, “occasional” voters in the NYC Democratic primary, trusting them to choose a competent candidate that can see through all the false promises and lead NYC through difficult times.
Pre-Testing
To ensure our creative idea was viable, we did a pre-ad test with just the boards. The results were very positive from the start.
Production in Covid
Since we couldn’t film on location at City Hall - we made our own. Using VFX and directing the shoot remotely, Relation & our production partner, Pluck Studio, were able to create a Covid safe environment to recreate a mock mayoral inauguration.
The Creative
We were able to make a bunch of great creative work from our special effects recreation of NYC City Hall and mock inauguration, to some more fun, out of the box ideas.
Promise 60
Barnacle
Work To Do
Promise 30
Lazer
Post-testing
After we completed production of our Promise concept, we then ran an ad test against likely NYC voters and found that the ad worked extremely well to motivate our target audience to turnout to vote.
The Big Insight
Using proprietary data from Vizio and LG, we were able to watch in real time the media spending of all candidates and their outside groups. We noticed a crazy trend - more than 85% of media budgets were being spent on traditional broadcast TV.
In NYC, roughly half of New Yorkers have begun to cut the cord. And 41% of African American voters, 43% of Hispanic voters, and 40% of Women voters can ONLY be reached on OTT (Over The Top devices; ie Streaming, Apple TV, Roku, etc.). We took advantage of these people who were being left behind and were able to reach our target voters on a one to one basis.
The Bottom Line
We Reached Voters That Were Left Behind
The other campaigns and outside groups involved in the mayor’s race were largely spending their media buys on broadcast television and just hammering those viewers. But over ½ of NYC has “cut the cord.” 41% of AFAM voters can ONLY be reached through OTT // streaming. We were able to reach those people with our first party data in a way that none of the other campaigns did.
The Magic Happens When The Media & The Creative Work Together
People’s media consumption habits are constantly evolving and we were able to optimize our media to give the highest quality of impressions. We noticed more and more people are watching YouTube on their traditional televisions which gave us the opportunity to have our ads be seen on the “big” screen just as a normal broadcast commercial would be displayed.
It Worked
Through the Google Brand Lift study, we can show that people who saw our ads were more likely to go vote than people who didn’t see our ads. Google tracks who saw our ads, serves a survey question in a video player to those people and as well as people who didn’t see our ads. This is about as definitive as you can get to show ad effectiveness.
