Case Study
A Multi-Channel Paid Campaign To Get Out The Vote In New York City
New York City Campaign Finance Board
The Challenge
Since 2020, major economic shifts, political tensions, misinformation and a global pandemic have drastically changed the way people live, work and vote in New York City. Not only this, but NYC’s 2022 election cycle proved to be particularly challenging due to the unprecedented delay of the June primary election and the possibility of a law taking effect that would allow more than 800,000 non-citizens the right to vote for the first time in the state’s history, placing the city’s election in the forefront of an already polarizing national landscape.
This was a crucial moment for the city to communicate timely, factual and unbiased information around the upcoming elections for city residents to stay up-to-date and engaged in this essential civic process. The New York City Campaign Finance Board (CFB), a nonpartisan, independent city agency that informs and empowers New York voters, tapped Fenton to support their NYC Votes initiative and deploy a paid media strategy that would reach New Yorkers, specifically young people and newly naturalized citizens during the second primary of 2022 and the general election.
Our Approach
To amplify the reach and efficacy of NYC Votes, Fenton conceptualized and strategically deployed both primary and general election campaigns to promote voter awareness and participation among these two identified audiences. Our voter education and engagement campaigns worked synergistically and fit seamlessly into existing CFB GOTV efforts.
Across both the primary and general election, our spending accounted for nearly $1.5 million of multi-channel paid advertising that spanned out of home (including guerilla marketing tactics), social media, programmatic, search and video advertising.
Fenton carefully crafted media plans that strategically allocated funds to different platforms to best target our two key audiences of newly naturalized voters and young voters where they indexed most highly across the five NY boroughs. Additionally, we deployed ads in five different languages – English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, and Bengali – to ensure that we met our audiences in their own languages and provided them crucial persuasion and mobilization messaging natively. Inspired by the vitality of the city, we employed guerilla marketing tactics like light projection displays, mobile LED billboards, and digital subway entrance panels to pop while voters went about their lives. Additionally, we strategically allocated a portion of our spending toward more emerging social platforms such as Snapchat and Twitch to turn out as many 18-35 year-old voters as possible.
Impact
Our campaigns successfully increased turnout across New York while also leveraging paid media best practices to surpass industry benchmarks.
The campaign yielded:
- 123,511,343 million impressions across both digital and OOH ads for both the primary and general election.
- 26,491,924 video completes across both campaigns.
- Each individual voter saw our ads an average of 8 times per week, surpassing our projection of 5-7 times a week.
- 260,002 clicks to the NYC Votes website, where voters learned more about the upcoming election.
We are energized by our learnings from this campaign and look forward to continuing this partnership with CFB in the coming election seasons to support NYC voters in electing officials that best reflect the needs of their communities.
