GOOGLE POLITICS & ELECTIONS

Role: Copy Lead

The opportunity: The 2016 election cycle was unpredictable, fast-moving, and deeply polarized. For those on the campaign trail, the biggest challenge wasn’t delivering a message—it was knowing which message to deliver, where, and when. Until then, real-time insights into voter sentiment and momentum simply didn’t exist at scale. We saw an opportunity to change that—and give campaigns unprecedented visibility into the digital pulse of the electorate.

The solution: We built a centralized, robust platform to help political campaigns connect with voters, understand the landscape, and manage their digital presence more effectively. Our tools gave campaigns the ability to:

  • Monitor real-time search and social trends to identify which issues were gaining traction

  • Appear front and center when voters searched for information on candidates or issues

  • Strengthen their presence across search, social, and web

  • Reach voters with precision through programmatic ad buying, audience segmentation, and analytics-driven media strategies

The impact
For the first time, political campaigns had a digital command center to shape strategy in real-time—not weeks after the fact. Our tools and insights helped transform how candidates campaigned and how voters engaged with the democratic process:

  • Over 1 billion searches related to the 2016 U.S. election on Google

  • 233 million+ unique viewers of election-related content on YouTube

  • 65% of voters used digital platforms as their primary source of election news

  • Digital political ad spend exceeded $1.4 billion, more than doubling from the 2012 cycle

  • Campaigns using our platform saw up to 5x ROI on digital ad spend through better targeting and measurement

Why it matters: This wasn’t just a marketing campaign—it was a transformation in how democracy connects with digital. For the first time, campaigns could act on real-time voter sentiment, and people across the globe could engage with the electoral process in new, immediate ways. We didn’t just help candidates show up—we helped them show up smarter