In 2024 WE
TRIED TO Re-ELECT
A PRESIDENT.

THEN WE TRIED TO
ELECT A NEW ONE.

WE LEARNED
A WHOLE LOT.

So, What did I DO?

As a Design Lead on the Harris for President Creative Team, I led our Paid Media and Organic Social creative. This meant:

  • Strategizing creative concepts with our in house media and social teams based on targeted audience, mediums we’d be running on, and past performance.

  • Overseeing and art directing designer’s production across our 18 person team as well as coordinating and directing vendor support, ensuring work was strategically sound, high quality, and delivered as quickly as possible.

  • Getting hands on and designing thousands of deliverables, including social creative, out-of-home billboards, display banners, merchandise, and even a couple airplanes.

The intensity of the campaign clarified and distilled my decade of creative experience a few key principals that served my work and the team’s well, and that I’ll carry with me for the rest of my career:

  • See it, do it.  Pitch in and don’t wait to be told, no task that needs doing was too small or not in my job description.

  • Keep it moving.  We worked all hours knowing the sooner our work was done, the sooner it could go live and start persuading voters.

  • Work isn’t finished till it’s ready to sell. I produced in-situation mockups, templates, and editable slide decks to help ensure easier buy in from higher ups by presenting our work as it would appear for our audience, grounding approvers with the context they need to easily understand the work they’re reviewing.

Paid Media

Key Projects - we’ll get into the nitty gritty on this work further down, so keep scrolling if your interest is piqued.

  • Targeted audiences with native styled content, designed to put campaign messaging in their language.

  • Sports arenas digital out of home (DOOH) billboards at NBA and college football games.

  • Debate night Philly out-of-home takeover shock and awe campaign, with everything from billboards to taxis, chalk decals to drone shows, we went nuclear to rattle Trump before the his only debate.

  • Our Mobilize Information campaign targeted our key demos in swing states testing a wide array of creative and building on the most successful concepts in subsequent flights, culminating in rapid final weeks responses for ballot curing and voter motivation. (Coming soon.)

Honorable Mentions - because we made so many things in so little time and you’re also busy, so we can’t get into everything. But here’s a quick rundown of work that focused on hyping up our audiences and driving enthusiasm, reminding them why voting for the Vice President was fun, important, and a moment they’d want to be a part of:

  • Spotify Ads - “Cover art” style ads to accompanied our audio scripts on Spotify, ranging from straightforward messaging of the Vice President’s policies to the idea of “muting” Trump (wouldn’t your music sound so much better than his whining?) or even a concept that put a spin on a Kanye West album, marrying Trump’s Project 2025 to the idea that no one man should have too much power (and reinforcing the somewhat forgotten ties Trump has to the fallen star).
    We also sponsored charli xcx to be Spotify’s featured artist during the Democratic National Convention in a knowing wink to her Gen Z fans and the endorsement heard round the world that “Kamala was brat,” accompanied by takeover ads that leaned into her “brat” album visual design, furthering building the Vice President’s cool factor.

  • Buzzfeed “I Voted” Stickers - We partnered with Buzzfeed to sponsor their AI created, school contest inspired “I Voted” stickers, blanketing the page with bright, splashy Harris themed stickers in display ad creative I designed.

  • Billboards blanketing the battleground states in the home stretch, featuring our closing argument messaging. Positive GOTV messaging designed for local connections, inspiring enthusiasm, optimism, and a sense of being a part of our history, as well as our Project 2025 negative messaging spotlighting the radical policies and unchecked power that come with a second Trump term.

  • Advertising our sponsored Fortnite world and produced in game issue focused creative that users would see when playing the Harris-Walz map, designed to fit seamlessly in the Fortnite world with bright, action styling native to the typical user, no red/white/blue to be found.

  • The Las Vegas Sphere - I helped come up with creative concepts for how to best take advantage of the space (ultimately landing on a key motif of the “I Voted” sticker from across the country, drawing everyone in to the cause and making use of the spherical shape), driving enthusiasm and excitement through earned media both locally in a key swing state and nationwide. And as the first political campaign to ever book the space, we succeeded.

PAID MEDIA

SPEAK THEIR LANGUAGE:
KEY TARGETED AUDIENCE
HOME PAGE TAKEOVERS

Targeted audiences with native styled content, designed to put campaign messaging in their language and break through as non-political visuals to a non-politically minded audience.

  • On Fantasy Football websites (Yahoo Fantasy and Draft Kings Fantasy) I fashioned our candidates as desirable, draftable players, using our audience’s terminology and the styling of the sites to make a clear and authentic connection.

  • On video game review website IGN, I turned the candidates into playable characters, playing with positive and negative standard video game character traits and popular dark fantasy game visual style to connect with our audience.

(No, we couldn’t figure out who had the TVEyes account to get a more professional clip of this.)

PAID MEDIA

PHILLY IS WIT KAMALA:
DEBATE NIGHT INTEGRATED CAMPAIGN

We used what would turn out to be the campaign’s only presidential debate to psych out Donald Trump, flooding the zone with pro-Harris creative so he’d enter the city to play, essentially, an “away game",” shock and awe’d by overwhelming Philly support for the Vice President. With taxi cabs to posters to billboards, culminating in a drone show behind the iconic Philadelphia Art Museum, we made sure our work resonated with Philadelphians and the medium they appeared in, and would be so present Trump couldn’t miss it.

Thrown off his game, the debate went down as a resounding win for the Vice President, and the ad placements spoke so organically to the city and were so effective needing Trump they earned their own round of press coverage.

  • Our Digital Out-Of-Home billboards blanketed downtown Philly and took over highly visible placements on Market Street and other key city focal points.

  • Guerrilla style placements in wheatpasted posters, sidewalk decals, and chalk stencils helped bolster the VP’s organic groundswell of local support.

  • A food truck distributed snacks tying Harris to Philadelphian’s favorites.

PAID MEDIA

GETTING IN THE GAME: SPORTS ARENA DOOH TAKEOVERS

Continuing to seek out ways to reach our target audiences who weren’t consuming news or political content, we blanked NBA and college football stadiums with political ads that engaged our viewers by not immediately looking like political ads.

  • An Atlanta Hawks NBA game featured imagery of Kamala Harris and Magic Johnson, downplaying campaign branding and using Magic’s quote and sports terminology to feel native to the environment.

  • At a Detroit Pistons game, we leaned into the team’s colors and branding and Kamala’s recent local appearance wearing the beloved “Detroit vs Everybody” t-shirt, leaning into her ties to the community.

PAID MEDIA

TEACH A MAN TO VOTE: MOBILIZING WITH INFORMATION

Our Mobilization Information campaign targeted our key demos in swing states testing a wide array of social and display banner creative that gave voters the intel and resources they needed to cast their vote. tools and

Once we persuaded our audience to vote (and vote for the Vice President) we tested a range of creative styles and concepts, then built on the most successful in subsequent flights. Beginning with teaching voters how to request a ballot to vote early, we informed them how to cast those ballots and finally how to vote in person, or cure their ballots if there were any potential issues.

Previous tests showed us that three types of creative worked best:

  • State-specific - featuring recognizable references to the state, like the name as featured text, state outline, or including relevant coloring/symbols

  • Candidate focused - making candidate imagery the most prominent element

  • Official notification style - our top performing style was created to mimic official government notices and warnings, were purposefully designed to look clumsily designed.

We deliberately designed our concepts with ease of editing in mind, knowing we’d need to reproduce our creative concept across 9 resizes for social and display, and up to 11 swing states, equaling 99 assets per concept. Getting too complex or hyper-specific wouldn’t be feasible for the level of production needed in the final weeks of the campaign.