Background

Historically the heart of America’s Brass industry, Waterbury is an industrious city with a political history plagued with crisis and corruption. Paul Pernerewski entered the race as Mayor with an optimistic view of the days to come for Waterbury. As a lifelong resident of Waterbury, Paul set out to continue building on the progress of the retiring mayor and leave a positive mark on the community he calls home.

Approach

Kinetic began our strategic communications engagement by developing message frames that would inform the way the campaign tackled local issues — from community safety to revitalization efforts in Waterbury’s rebuilding downtown. Kinetic reviewed releases, built social graphic templates for use by the campaign, and reviewed and supervised content in order to enforce  message discipline and consistency. Then, we used the framings and issues to inform our media planning process. Kinetic worked with our data and programmatic partners to implement a multi-channel persuasion and mobilization campaign that shared Paul’s vision for Waterbury with targeted voters. We leveraged both static and 6s assets across Meta, Google, YouTube, and programmatic display. When Paul’s opponent started running a 30s spot on TV, we responded within 48 hours by producing our own 30s ad made from in-house creative that we used to create our first linear TV ad. We also ran the spot on CTV. Our agile approach paired with our media planning and buying experience allowed us to foray into TV ad placements for the first time as a firm.

Result

Paul won his election. Fewer than 600 votes separated him from his Republican opponent and we slightly edged his opponent on spending and ran a campaign that was lean but agile. While our scope was largely centered around media planning and buying, our partnership was much greater than that — we were an embedded partner the campaign could count on in the most pressing moments for strategic and communication needs. In the end, our ads reached over 500,000 people in Waterbury and generated over 3,000,000 impressions across multiple digital channels. Our campaign hit all frequency goals and achieved CPMs lower than estimated in our media plan.