Getting people to vote, when it isn’t mandatory

The Problem

There was an election?

It’s one thing to get people to vote for you, but it’s an entirely different ball game to get them to vote at all. In order to get people into the polls (or to send a postal vote), we needed to address the barriers people have to voting. We had to take the belief that voting is a waste of time that didn’t matter, and create a sense of pride around voting. For the campaign to resonate with a younger target audience, we had to show how impactful a vote is.

The Idea

Vote for anyone.

There are lots of things that are affected by the outcome of your local government elections, but not all of those things have the power to vote. Your local swimming pool, your local park, and your local library can’t vote. You can. It seems silly to point out (because it is), but there’s a sad truth in knowing that their fate is up to us. Personifying the important things in our community allows us to get a little emotional and consider the impact of our vote. If we don’t ‘vote for them’, who will?

To make civic pride relevant, it needed a paintjob, and it needed to be cool. The lively visual style was designed to be modular so that any important thing could be highlighted and still make a lasting impression. But beyond just aesthetics, the entire campaign needed to be a breath of fresh air for politics. The sentimental, yet comedic video executions are certainly just that. Working with Flare from the idea’s inception took a relatively low production budget and made it feel much larger. It’s a shining example of how the Marketforce Group thinks creatively at all stages of a campaign’s lifecycle.