In my second installment of The Ways the 2020 Presidential Campaigns Evolved Digital Marketing we’ll talk about how video content, emails and texting dominated during this year’s presidential campaigning. If you missed out on part one of the series, click here.

Marketers have been screaming about video content for the past decade, but 2020 was the first campaign cycle to harness it effectively. Don’t get me wrong — campaigns in past cycles have put together some beautiful video ads. But these videos were usually ads; long form and traditionally composed.

The 2016 cycle flirted with a more social-first video approach. Both major campaigns published clip-highlight reels underscored with bold, accessible subtitles. Each posted a few “candid” messages (remember the #Chillary Snapchat?). But neither put together frequent short-form content. You’ll have to take my word for it because it’s shockingly hard to search historical content on social platforms.

2020 saw both the Biden and Trump campaigns taking notes from popular YouTube channels and social marketers by creating video content formatted uniquely for social media engagement. Trump’s campaign ran ad dollars behind YouTube videos with catchy titles and catchier cover frames.

Biden’s campaign set him and Kamala up in Late Show-style formats.

Both Biden and Trump’s teams understood the importance of churning out extremely sharable video content. The content itself doesn’t have to be earth-shatteringly innovative or expensive. But those screaming marketers were right: video content is here to stay. Widespread adoption of smartphones and stable data connections have finally forced political campaigns to adapt. Your organization is next!

Campaigns have been testing subject lines for a long time now. Usually an email is composed for a specific audience with a specific call to action and then sent in small batches with different subject lines to discover which has the best open rate. Over time, this approach has led to a bit of an arms race. Mail merging a recipient’s name performs well. So does adding emojis. National figures getting creepily personal (“Nick, please help me —Barack Obama”) must get amazing results.

Despite expecting a routine escalation, things got even more extremely desperate than I could have imagined this cycle. Every subject line included weird unicode characters or urgent warnings of imminent danger. Grammar and formatting standards were thrown out in favor or something — anything — to make people click.

But hey, it has got to be harder than ever to get folks to click these days! Most recipients have caught on to the game. Gmail has automatically filtered promotional emails. Outside organizations and down-ballot candidates are fighting for attention. I can’t blame campaigns for going extreme.

After all, win or lose it’s all over on election day. Campaign lists can have a valuable afterlife, but a campaign’s primary incentive is to juice any possible donor or volunteer out of a list before then. Unsubscribes aren’t really a big deal when you look at it that way…

This one feels obvious. Chances are, a couple weeks before the election you received upwards of 20 texts from volunteers in a single weekend. Texting was a much more prominent form of voter outreach this cycle due to the constraints of the pandemic.

But texting programs were bound to expand this cycle even before the pandemic hit. Open rates on text messages are astronomically high. Voters, donors, and volunteers of all ages are way more likely to read and engage via text than email or phone. With every passing year, folks feel more comfortable sending personal information and money via text without ever hearing each others’ voices.

While many of these messages could be automated, both campaigns went through the trouble of getting real volunteers to send texts using scripts with prepared answers to common questions. This required specialized digital training tools and constant adjustments to the advised scripts — not to mention a ton of targeted contact lists. It’s all a bit more complicated (and less effective) than door-knocking, but I expect the texts to stick around for 2022 and 2024. There’s a lower barrier to entry for volunteers, and campaigns appreciate the ability to shift targets and messaging with the click of a button.

[Note: Texting is one national campaign tactic that I suspect may be more successful for smaller organizations with more attentive audiences. A single volunteer text feels a lot more special than 20.]

Did you notice any tactical changes this campaign cycle? Curious about how some of the 2020 tools could be adapted for a smaller organization? Team Tunheim loves to talk about digital marketing! Get in touch.

A series of coincidences led me — a bright-eyed early 20-something theater major — to work on the Obama 2012 re-election campaign at its Chicago headquarters. My job largely revolved around the creation of website landing pages featured in campaign emails and social media posts. I remember being in awe of the incredible brains of the developers on my team. These people went on to work at Google, Uber, Nest, and the New York Times. And I’ve watched over the years as their campaign innovations became digital marketing standards adopted by all sorts of organizations across the country.

Presidential campaigns are the ultimate start-ups. Within 18 months an entire technical ecosystem is established, supporting thousands of employees and engaging nearly every American. These operations harness the latest technology and marketing tactics out of necessity. How else would they raise the unprecedented amounts of money necessary to mobilize voters? What’s more: the definite timeline and high stakes of an election encourage some awesome risk-taking.

In my humble opinion, all digital marketers need to pay close attention to the evolution of tactics each campaign cycle. It’s the best snapshot of the industry we have. What’s viable? What’s outdated? What’s overrated? The outcome of the election reveals all.

Welcome to our two-part series on the ways 2020 campaigns evolved digital marketing. In today’s post I’ll be covering targeted ads and branding. Let’s dive in.

One of the main takeaways from the 2016 cycle — for better or worse — is that Trump’s team was genius for generating endless microtargeted ads. These ads largely played by the rules Google and Facebook established. They were often kind of sloppy but iteratively tailored for unique audiences.

While Hillary’s campaign allotted resources towards producing beautiful TV-style ads and promoting local events, Trump’s funneled a ton of money into low-dollar ad buys all across the web. These ads usually operated as fishing hooks to make sure the campaign identified as many Trump supporters as possible and captured their email contact information. It wasn’t particularly innovative, but operatives like Brad Parscale got a lot of credit for convincing campaign leaders to go all-in on the tactic.

Leaders of the 2020 cycle didn’t have to be convinced. The digital ad teams on both sides were clearly working with larger budgets. I saw official campaign ads pop up on news sites, streaming services, social apps, and search engines.

One thing stood out to me: the ads I saw on digital platforms were often much different in tone and composition than the official tv ads, indicating I was being targeted by demographic attribute or interest. (Millenials don’t respond to the same content as Boomers, and sometimes it’s obvious when the algorithm has you pegged.)  Between YouTube videos I routinely got served an official ad that was basically a slideshow about how much dogs love Joe Biden.

Only campaign operatives know how many official targeted ads were generated this cycle, but I feel safe in guessing it was exponentially more than 2016.

I’m a design nerd, so I take logo choices too seriously. And I thought both 2020 campaigns’ logos were incredibly boring. I remember seeing Trump’s logo for the first time in 2016 and thinking it barely looked like a watermark. I remember seeing Biden’s logo for the first time during the primaries and laughing about how nondescript it was. But the joke is on me because these utilitarian brands got the job done.

Typically, brands want a logo to convey their personality and message. It’s a mistake to look at Biden and Trump’s respective logos through that lens. While both logos imbue a sense of strength and patriotism, they are exceedingly recognizable and legible.

Think of all of the different formats and contexts for a campaign logo. Campaign logos have to look good on yard signs, social media posts, busses, email signatures, t-shirts…. The list goes on and on. Over the past decade, it seems as though presidential campaigns are veering toward a single, simple logo lockup that can look good everywhere.

Think about how much praise the Obama 2008 rising sun logo received. It was full of meaning and detail. Over time, that sun logo was flattened down to its main shapes and colors in order to look great on digital platforms. But the Obama 2012 campaign continued to work with an expansive design language allowing its identity to adapt to new fonts, colors and shapes for different constituencies. For example, Latinos for Obama had an entire sub-brand that looked similar but different to the sub-brand of LGBT for Obama.

Hillary’s 2016 campaign took this direction to an interesting midpoint by featuring a highly recognizable but adaptable H logo. The H could be filled with photos and colors to recognize constituencies and holidays as needed. The H was recognizable in all contexts, but allowed some room for fun and personalization. Each battleground state had their own H filled with a famous local landmark.

Both Biden and Trump’s design teams stripped away most of the hallmarks of a design system down to the essentials: a single logo treatment, a few colors and a font or two. There were no battleground state logos. From the outside, I couldn’t recognize anything complex enough to be called a brand architecture. [Notable exceptions: One time they changed the Biden logo for Pride. Women for Trump is pink.]

And I think it worked fine. The K.I.S.S. principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) ensured supreme brand consistency. While campaign materials might have lacked enough branding to be recognizable without a logo, you can be sure everything had a logo. The same logo. The campaign logo.

Did you notice any tactical changes this campaign cycle? Curious about how some of the 2020 tools could be adapted for a smaller organization? Team Tunheim loves to talk about digital marketing! Get in touch.

Read Part Two of this series, which focuses on the digital marketing tactics of video content, emails and texting.