• by Larissa Faw , November 5, 2018

With Election Day just around the corner, agencies are doing their bit to help get out the vote. Forsman & Bodenfors New York, David&Goliath, Duncan Channon and Praytell are just four ad agencies that are part of a 300-plus coalition of companies across the U.S. who are encouraging their own employees to vote through programs, like paid time off, a day without meetings, the option of working from home or providing resources for mail-in ballots. 

Some shops are linking the bid to end gun violence with voting. Sandy Hook Promise and agency VaynerMedia, for example are raising awareness about gun violence prevention through the “Common Ground” digital and audio campaign.

The audio ads are best heard through headphones because each ear plays left- and-right-wing ideology (without headphones, the ads sound like a noisy batch of jabbering) and run on donated media via Spotify and Pandora. Video versions are posted on Sandy Hook Promise’s Facebook and Twitter pages. 

And McCann teamed with several March for Our Lives activists and pop star Kesha and her brother Sage and others to create a music video that dramatizes the cycle of gun violence and reminds young people that voting is the only way to end it. The film features a song, written the day after the Parkland shooting by Sage who was a senior in high school at the time.

Collective PAC, along with CBC PAC, Liquid Soul, and Reach Media, are spending $160,000 to purchase radio ads to get Black voters to the polls. The ads feature celebrities and politicians like Regina King, Jeff Johnson, Roland Martin, Ed Gordon, Tom Joyner, U.S. Reps. Robin Kelly, G.K. Butterfield and Greg Meeks, encouraging the two million Black registered voters in eight states to make sure their voices count. 

The Democratic Party of Virginia is partnering with animation shop Scout and others  on a pro bono campaign to encourage Virginians to cast their votes.  Nearly two dozen spots are designed for social media by using bright animation and simple, informative messaging, but forgoing audio which is typically turned off by viewers, says campaign strategist Ann Glenn, adding that most get-out-the-vote campaigns traditionally try to shame non-voters into voting, an approach that is “simply not effective," she says. "Our job was to convince these folks that their vote does indeed matter.”

Although these spots are created for the 2018 midterms, a concerted effort was made to keep the animation evergreen, with end cards created to be easily changed, so the videos could be used for future elections.

The voter advocacy group Acronym is working with Combate Americas, the Hispanic Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) sports franchise, to mobilize and register Millennial Hispanics.The creative, developed by Combate America’s newly created multiplatform studios, La Jaula Studios, features the league's Bantamweight Champion Jose Alday as he discusses his journey to America in Spanish and notes the importance of voting. The media strategy — called the largest digital program focused on registering and mobilizing voters by Acronym — runs across Combate Americas programming.