The New Hampshire Republicans had been enjoying unified control of New Hampshire since Governor Chris Sununu won the gubernatorial election in 2017. But, as signs of a Democratic wave started to form the New Hampshire Democratic Party knew that they had an incredible opportunity to flip that to a Democratic trifecta in 2018. While they saw the clear opportunity, they knew that to realize such a political sea change, they would need to pull out all the stops to win in a huge number of tiny State House seats all over the state, as well as flip several larger State Senate seats.
And fight they did, with an unprecedented coordinated effort to push candidates across the state with field and other support, the New Hampshire Democratic Party wanted to add a sophisticated and intense digital advertising effort spanning more than 60 battleground State House and 9 State Senate districts to ensure that the effort resulted in a flip of both chambers on Election Day. Programmatic digital had to be the core of Democrats’ paid voter contact because these districts are quite small and because Boston’s media market is exceedingly expensive and inefficient.
Such an unprecedented scale of so many small digital advertising campaigns would be cumbersome with traditional digital advertising methods, so we leveraged the industry-leading power of our self-serve platform, DemocraticAds.com. Ultimately, this empowered our partner, Bridge Communications, to set up, monitor, and optimize an incredibly large number of ad campaigns simultaneously over the final three months of the campaign.
In addition to the impressive scale of the campaign, the variety of targeting options made possible by the self-service platform empowered our clients to run unique combinations of targeted audiences and creative to ensure the most impactful results. Turf where the client had more research and targeting available used fully customized lists uploaded themselves to be matched to online profiles, and we used more turnout modeled and partisan score based individual targeting in others. This combination of granular voter targeting, small geographic districts, and self-service speed, reporting and optimization are really the first of its kind.
In the end, this sophisticated and incredibly complicated individually targeted programmatic digital advertising campaign helped Democrats flip BOTH chambers of the New Hampshire legislature by winning four seats in the State Senate and 57 seats in the State House.
This work also secured DSPolitical the 2018 Reed Award for “Best Online Targeting for a State Legislative Campaign.”