• by Philip Rosenstein , February 10, 2017

In the last days before the deadline to sign up for health-care coverage through the exchanges set up by the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), the Trump administration forced the cancellation of advertisements informing Americans about the deadline.

DSPolitical, the progressive digital ad network, struck back. 

“When we found out President Trump had unilaterally defunded advertising for people to be routed to where they could sign up to purchase life-saving health care, we decided we had to do something,” Jim Walsh, cofounder and CEO of DSPolitical, told Red, White & Blog.

The weekend before Tuesday, January 31, the last day to sign up for health-care coverage, DSPolitical worked with former healthcare.gov CMO Josh Peck to get “life-saving” ads out as quickly as possible.

Through a GoFundMe campaign and help from the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, Rising Tide Interactive and more than 50 other individual donors, DSPolitical was able to help more than 4,000 people sign up for health-care coverage.

According to Walsh, the numbers on the ads were a first: With a spend of $6,396, the campaign was able to clock 15.5K impressions, with a 25.27% click through rate.

The three-day search advertising-only campaign ran in the states of North Carolina, Florida, Georgia, Texas and Pennsylvania.