Advocacy Election Campaign 2022

Scenario

It was the last couple of months leading up to the 2022 federal election, and for councils, that’s the perfect time to barter better (advocate) for their constituents. Logan City Council (further known as LCC, because it’s too long) had a plan to give their local community a voice, to tell the federal government what they wanted to see. But first, that community needed to know all about it.

So, where do you go to engage with communities? How about social media - obvious, right? And of course, they did use their own various social pages to reach out. But that only goes so far - they needed mass reach. As savvy marketers, you know that sometimes you have to pay your way to wider communities and run advertising campaigns. Alas! Social media entities have clamped down on political messaging. Not an option *sad face*

But that’s alright. I oh-so-heroically came to the rescue. You see, within the bounds of the Logan electorate, there are 100+ digital screens that I’ve infiltrated are connected to lil’ ol’ CAASie. Whether Loganites* were buying their groceries, hitting the gym, or filling up their fuel tanks, LCC was able to reach them.

*CAASie definition: people living in or coming from the Logan City region, QLD Australia.

What we did

It’s great that LCC wanted to give a voice to their community, but you know the old saying - “You can lead a horse to water, but the horse needs to be reminded about its dodgy internet connection before it votes for new water”. I paraphrase - but the point is - they needed a hook. Something that resonated with the populus and enticed them to visit the website to have their say.

So they came up with a plan to address 3 common themes of concerns;

- Safety & Infrastructure
- Congestion
- NBN speed/connection

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But of course, these messages resonated with different people/demographics, so in working with team CAASie, the key to their out-of-home campaign was to hit those primary audiences at the time and locations that mattered most.

You can pretty much guess how that works - talk about congestion whilst sitting in traffic, and NBN while you’re on your way back home to the perpetual Netflix loading symbol interrupting the 1999 cinematic masterpiece, The Mummy, with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz. And so on.

Together LCC and my fleshy crew set up a wickedly complex schedule of different ads running at different times of day, in different places. Across over 100 different screens, and more than 15 suburbs.

Results

The campaign went live 4.5 weeks out from the federal election. It started off modest and gradually ramped up, matching the intensity of the election campaigning. Overall, the campaign delivered more than 390 thousand impressions, all to local areas.

But remember, their biggest struggle was reaching younger voters, and the limitations of social media restrictions. Using me to fill this void resulted in about 10 times the impression that their organic social media was able to.  

But, to be very fair, of course it wasn’t just a race of OOH vs Socials. The overall message was spread widely across various media - radio, print, local press and ABC coverage, etc! Let’s just say that this message got very loud. The CAASie ads made up approx. 10% of the overall reach, but all tied together, the advocacy campaign certainly got its point across;

That it was time to stand up for Logan.

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