Paid media
Senior Design Lead
At the Elizabeth Warren for President campaign, we departed from traditional campaign structure by building out a fully in-house operation. Our team rejected super pacs and closed donor fundraisers, relying solely on small donor support. The paid media team worked with a huge array of vendors on both print and digital platforms, aiming to raise money and persuade democratic swing voters.
As the lead paid media designer I worked closely with the paid media team to determine best performing graphics and creative optimization for our specific audience targets in order to raise money. My graphics and creative strategy helped raise over $40 Million dollars from paid media in a 14 month period.
Through weekly meetings with the team, I made sure paid media was included on cross-platform creative direction and tactics. I pushed to use social graphics with less text and a more attractive visuals at a 1:1 ratio to optimize for mobile. Testing showed these simple and compelling graphics increased performance and became the standard moving forward.
Some of the best performing acquisition and donation posts were from our contest creative. We ran two primary contests, one flying out winners to watch the Democratic Primary debates to meet Elizabeth, and the other offering a the opportunity to grab a drink with Elizabeth. We ran a minimum of one contest a month, optimizing and tweaking the creative each round. After a few months of testing, we found airplane imagery and an untreated image of Warren toasting with friends were the top performers so always ran those alongside new imagery and contest options.
When it came to persuading voters we primarily used video creative produced by our in-house production team, but diversified our reach with companion HTML5 banners, billboards, local news coverage promotion, and print ads placed in local newspapers. For persuasion pieces we opted for either a more native look or leaned into simple, core branded designs.
One of the challenges we faced was designing for copy that started discussing a negative issue and then switched to a positive solution offered by Warren. I pushed to invest in animation and stark color contrasts to visualize the shift from ‘problem to solution.’
At the end of the campaign we included more print placements in our media mix.
