Case Study:

A Better Wisconsin Together Political Fund

The New Media Firm was honored to partner with our friends in the progressive and labor movements to run an aggressive and innovative campaign to help Jill Karofsky win the critical race for Wisconsin Supreme Court.

Our Strategy

Our program was firmly grounded in the idea that business as usual would not lead us to victory. We did not know at the outset of the campaign how true that would be. We researched and tested messaging to help us determine the best creative to run for different segments of voters. Throughout the month-long paid media program, we ran countless creative pieces on digital and television, and on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, through our programmatic advertising networks, as well as significant investment on streaming services like Hulu and Roku.

Message Testing

Starting March 13th, we tested engagement on dozens of pieces of creative. We used our findings to help inform our messaging and creative for the remainder of the campaign and served specific content on social media and programmatic to critically important segments. The creative used messages attacking Daniel Kelly’s extreme record and touting Karofsky’s judicial independence. We also produced a series of grassroots videos using teachers and nurses and to deliver messages attacking Daniel Kelly’s extreme positions. One of our spots featured Patti Seger, a domestic violence victim advocate providing a trusted voice about Jill Karofsky’s commitment to protecting crime victims that helped inoculate Karofsky and push back on the false ads coming from Kelly’s allies.

As more resources came to the effort, we were able to expand our program to add television in key markets across the state. While we were outspent, we bought more daytime TV to match the pandemic audience, purchased highly watched broadcast subchannels like Bounce, and :15 second book ends to increase our rating points. We looked at the combined audience reach of TV and digital and synched up the content and buys. In fact we put the same :15 digital ads on TV - because we knew they worked because they were pretested on digital.

An Aggressive Absentee Ballot Push

We were also faced with the first major election during the coronavirus pandemic and knew we had to turn out people to out to vote – not solely at polling locations, but by absentee ballots. From the start we ran aggressive advertising to base Democratic voters calling on them to request an absentee ballot and directing them to the state election commission. We followed those who clicked through with multiple absentee chase digital ads tailored to their community, some featuring Milwaukee Congresswoman Gwen Moore who we recorded via Zoom.

Outcome

It’s been called “Democrats’ Improbable Victory” — and for good reason. Despite enormous spending by the opposition, last minute shenanigans by the right-wing courts in-state and at the federal level, and a global pandemic, we prevailed. Karofsky won with 55.3% of the vote to Kelly’s 44.7%.

We knew it wouldn’t be easy to win this race, but our commitment to run a digital first campaign and to use new tactics and strategies was a combination that served us well — and helped us unseat an incumbent Wisconsin state Supreme Court Justice for only the second time in half a century.