On Election Day, Bridget Mary McCormack won a seat on the Michigan Supreme Court. Why should you care? Because she may very well owe her victory in part to Facebook, where more than half of her late-game advertising budget was spent.
A week before the election, victory was far from assured. McCormack was running on the "non-partisan" section of the ballot, often overlooked by voters. She was in striking distance of victory, but not on top of the polls. An outside group made a large television ad buy against her, framing her as a friend of terrorists for having represented terrorism suspects in court.
The campaign was in trouble, said new media political consultant Josh Koster, whose firm, Chong and Koster, worked on McCormack's digital strategy.
"She was called out by name, they were trying to sink her. By all conventional wisdom, [the TV ad buy] should've sunk her campaign," he said.
McCormack's luck changed when an unexpected last-minute financial contribution gave her campaign the resources needed to stay in the game. Like Richard Pryor in comedy classic Brewster's Millions, McCormack's staff needed to find a way to spend the money quickly and effectively, with only five days before Election Day.
"This was a late-money decision," said Koster. "Unexpected money came in towards the end and they said 'screw it, let's do it.' And they didn't have time to do other mediums at that point. Because of how quickly you can get Facebook ads live, it all became Facebook," said Koster.
McCormack's team started testing Facebook ads five days before the election, first experimenting with cheaper Marketplace ads, then scaling up to Facebook's more complex products after a winning message was discovered. During the last five days, the campaign was spending approximately 51% of its ad budget on Facebook, up from approximately 20% earlier in the election.
"The relatively small Facebook investment [helped McCormack] actually gain ground during that period rather than losing ground," said Sam Tift, Koster's colleague who quarterbacked the Facebook ad buy.
"It wasn't that Facebook ads took her from zero to victory," added Tift. "It was that the traditional stuff... had put her in contention, then the Facebook ads brought her home."
"It wasn't that Facebook ads took her from zero to victory," added Tift. "It was that the traditional stuff... had put her in contention, then the Facebook ads brought her home."
McCormack's campaign manager, Jon Hoadley, said a strong digital strategy was always a core element of the campaign he ran (and we believe him, given the viral success of a West Wing-themed YouTube video they made).
"From very early, we thought we need to be doing work online," said Hoadley. "From the very beginning, we thought about how we start an online conversation we can use to get Bridget's name out, and get people more engaged in the court and make it a high priority during what we knew would be a busy presidential year."
Hoadley won't go so far as to say social media won McCormack the election -- but he did credit Facebook ads and the campaign's overall online strategy with getting McCormack's name out there and giving the campaign the push needed to win the election.
"I feel we did a pretty good job of that, between choosing to utilize Twitter and Facebook to an extent and producing content we knew would align to that, like the West Wing ad, and making a strategic choice to spend more than 50% of our budget on Facebook specifically to find a way to drive home the rest of the work the campaign had done in the last few days," he said.
McCormack's story also flies in the face of earlier research on Facebook ads' efficacy in smaller campaigns.
"We made the choice in this campaign, one of the things we wanted to do really well was our Facebook community, and I think it paid off," said Hoadley.
How should local candidates use Facebook and Twitter? Share your thoughts in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Hocus-Focus
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