Context
Ukraine’s 2020 local elections: regional, district and city councils, mayors, and heads of township and village councils. Seven candidates came to us.
The working hypothesis was blunt. Marketing techniques that belong to business will beat the ones politics normally uses, which are billboards, leaflets, and a printed zine explaining why your candidate is simply the best.
Diagnosis
The field decides these races. Digital isn’t a replacement for knocking on doors, and anyone selling it as one is lying. But the field is also hard to measure. You can’t tell whether a leaflet worked. Digital contributes maybe 20 to 25% of the outcome, and that share is controllable in a way the rest of the campaign isn’t.
The bigger finding was about what moves a vote. People vote for a result. They need to see it, and they need reminding of it more than once. That rules out the standard promise-based campaign and points at a different job: show what’s already been done, or show one local problem with a solution attached.
And the agenda has to be genuinely local. Roads, schools, traffic, a building site. Not invented, and ideally with a ready answer behind it.
Decisions
- Built one funnel across YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, messengers and PR, then adapted the components per campaign instead of rebuilding each time
- Cut five videos per campaign for five audience segments: sport and lifestyle, patriotic, family values, digitalisation, and the main issue film
- Ran one message on every channel: you have a problem, this candidate has a solution
- Overlaid field data and the CRM onto geotargeting, so the digital audience and the door-knocking teams worked the same territory
Results
Six of the seven candidates won.
The campaigns split into two shapes. Incumbents ran on what had already been done, which works when the challenger has never held office and can only criticise. Challengers ran on one named local problem with a stated solution.
The positioning was the same in both: the candidate is local, speaks the way the voters speak, and has an answer. Five segment-specific videos let that land differently for a cyclist and a parent without changing the claim underneath.
The uncomfortable conclusion sits in the second hypothesis, which was that practically anyone can now become a deputy. Coming to power in Ukraine is cheaper and easier than it was, and that has brought unqualified people into government. It’s a real problem, and this work makes it easier.