Biden victory fund 2020
Creative Direction - Fundraising Ads
In 2020 Biden For President, the DNC, and 47 state parties entered a joint fundraising agreement as the Biden Victory Fund - I joined the team with two months to go, acting as the Creative Director of Middle Seat, hired to lead creative for all fundraising ads and oversee multiple designers cranking out hundreds of designs for the campaign.
My first task was revamping the look and feel of our current ad product to improve efficacy and brand identity. Our ads were all over the place, and we needed cohesion and vision to produce a higher volume of ads to meet the pace of churn in the production line. I got my team an interactive brand review with Biden’s Creative Director at the time, where we could hash out questions together and align on a common goal.
From there, we worked with the Biden creative team to create an advertising brand that fit with the existing campaign brand, allowed for more eye-catching visuals, and still embodied best practices of digital ads. With assumptions and mis-conceptions out of the way, and an aligned vision throughout all the different teams, we sat down and got to work.
But I refused to let my team simply become Photoshop monkeys, we were not just here to click buttons in a software program - we were here to bring creative ideas and excellence to the campaign. The team had zoom brainstorms on the weekly calendar, but they had turned into boring meetings where people mostly sat in silence while one or two people chatted through some small ideas. So we pivoted. Smaller team brainstorms, with breakout rooms, quiet research time, FigJam Boards, ongoing slack channels for inspo + ideation, and a ‘Yes And’ mentality.
With new, collaborative ideas flowing, my team needed data to determine what was working so we could build on the success. Alongside a data scientist, I built out a rigorous A/B testing to challenge assumptions and fully optimize our ad creative for conversions. My designers could finally see if their graphics were working, and we were able to run tests. We determined ‘footer’ style buttons worked best. We found top performing ideas and iterated on that success. Creative shined, my team collaborated, and our fundraising campaign soared.
Our ads raised over 1.4M in contributions.
