A political campaign is a microcosm of a branding effort. In a condensed period of time, the brand (a candidate) must establish awareness, determine accurate targeting, and effectively create emotional connections that resonate through a transaction – casting a ballot.
For a city election in Miami, a runoff was held between four candidates for City Commissioner. The goal for those on the ballot was to successfully reach voters to distinguish themselves effectively in the minds of the electorate.
How do you create immediate brand recognition and affinity that impacts the electorate in a compressed time period?
Strategy:
The Sabina Covo campaign worked with Edge Communications to develop a media plan for the candidate’s runoff election bid. In the race for City Commissioner in District 2 in Miami, Covo faced three other candidates in the election and needed to reach – and influence – as many registered voters in the district as possible. Covo had the advantage of being an established entrepreneur and journalist in the Miami area, so her messaging was the most important component of the campaign.
“There’s no doubt that TV advertising always plays a major role in our conversation, because it’s a trusted medium to deliver broad-based information to the electorate,” according to Christian Ulvert, Founder and President of Edge Communications.
Edge Communications trusted the impact that working with Effectv could have on their quest to reach a targeted audience quickly. Their strategy was to develop a balanced plan of local cable and broadcast to deliver the results they were looking for with the electorate.
“The strategies that Effectv enables give us two major advantages: first, we’re able to reach voters at a very granular, neighborhood level with limited resources, and secondly, [their] methods allow us to remain nimble to account for electorate changes along the way.”
Solution:
Effectv and Edge decided upon a strategy of using 59% of their budget on local cable with the remainder going to two local broadcast stations. The four-week flight would be heaviest in weeks two and three to deliver a solid punch for her message.
Results:
Using this balanced approach, Covo’s successful campaign strategy connected with the target audience, as they were 27% more likely to have seen the cable portion of the campaign compared to the average population in the district, while seeing her ad 2.7 times during the month. This was achieved through targeting programs and networks voters were likely to watch, while allocating 16% of impressions to what they’d identified as high-value programming, such as sports.1
Conclusion:
Edge Communications’ decision to partner with Effectv was a winning strategy for Covo. Effectv was able to counsel the campaign in the best practice to reach a wider pool of viewers than the other local campaigns.
“The results speak for themselves,” Ulvert said. “We took limited resources and were able to deploy them to make sure that we’d reach a subset of voters that I knew were paying attention to the race. Our client won by a 10-point margin in what was really a 3-way race. There’s no doubt that our advertising strategy with Effectv played a critical role in that victory.”
Want to learn more about how to work with a media partner you can trust? Watch the success story video below featuring Christian Ulvert of Edge Communications.
