Senator Jacky Rosen : Handing Dean Heller His First Ever Political Loss
Challenge
Rising Tide Interactive’s targeted, digital-first approach started a dialogue with critical voting blocs, especially young voters and Nevada’s Latinx community, early in our campaign. As a result, voter turnout among some of these groups grew by more than 320 percent. As anyone who’s been part of a tough campaign knows, mobilizing supporters can be key to winning or losing – and with RTI’s help we were able to flip Nevada’s Senate seat to blue.
Solution
HOW WE DID IT Engaging Latinx Voters We built a media plan that prioritized Latinx voters from Day One. RTI developed digital-only creative that focused on the issues Latinx voters care about, and targeted voters based on their browser’s language settings. Additionally, we served this historically low turnout demographic persuasion advertising with a GOTV push beginning five months before the election. Targeted Outreach In addition to our Latinx-specific tracks, we used polling and historical turnout data to narrowcast messages to specific groups online. Digital That Complements, Not Competes In addition to communicating with core digital targets that are difficult to reach through more traditional channels, we ran a broad program that helped reinforce paid media run through TV and mail. We matched the mail list to online profiles and ran digital-only creative that reinforced the campaign’s direct mail health care message. We analyzed previous election results and gave extra impressions to voters in key counties we needed to win. We built out multiple targeting groups so we could reallocate impression levels and shares based on whether they were likely to see paid media from traditional sources like TV or radio. We produced and conceptualized digital-only content, including direct-to-camera video with the candidate. And we developed digital-only creative that reinforced the TV and traditional pre-roll messages in a bite-sized, consumable way for social media channels.
Results
Persuade AND Turn Out Digital campaigns are no longer just for persuasion. Our program helped turn out the critical voters we needed to turn Nevada blue. Nevada early voting turnout was up from 2014 by 364 percent among 18- to 29-year-old voters, 327 percent among African-American voters, 157 percent among Hispanic voters and 133 percent among Asian-American and Pacific Islander voters. In addition to the GOTV targets we matched through the voter file, we were able to scale in a targeted way by running GOTV ads to critical and difficult to reach Latinx and young voters with demographic and geographic targeting. We also developed digital-only creative for specific turnout targets, and used traditional social pressure tactics.
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