What we investigated
- Which beliefs accelerate persuasion?
- Does tone matter?
- Is contrast always better than positive or negative?
- Does going political early hurt efficacy?
Answering long-held questions about political creative
After completing a year-long narrative framework project (see Economic Narrative Project) in 2023, my team and I were left with some questions about how to use the framework in political messaging and creative.
From these questions, the Political Beliefs Project was born. In early 2024, I worked with two vendors to develop 17 scripts and videos that played into 4 distinct beliefs that voters hold about politicians. We played with both humor and serious tones, contrast and pure negative scripts, and we tested the final ads with ~16k voters across battleground states.
The results provided the answers we were looking for and led to us updating the creative development process guidance and providing trainings to our grantees and their vendors. The testing results were the strongest we have ever seen across any ad set we have tested, setting us and our grantees up for success in 2024.