Warnock for Georgia
Starting in July of 2020, I served as the Creative and Video Director on the historic Warnock Campaign, which ultimately resulted in a win for Reverend Warnock, the first African-American Senator from Georgia. When I joined the campaign, Senator Rev. Warnock was polling last out of the main group of candidates in a 21 candidate special election primary, but with a lot of hard work, determination, creativity, and fundraising, we managed to ultimately flip all expectations.
Getting started.
The first issue our creative team and broader digital department had to tackle in our brand was that in July, Rev. Warnock was in no way a household name. Despite being the Senior Pastor of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King’s church, the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, nobody really knew who he was. We knew we had a strong candidate. The son of a junkman, who grew up poor, and went on to become the first person in his family to graduate college. He had been arrested while peacefully protesting for people’s healthcare rights on more than on occasion. He caravanned Katrina refugees, who had wound up in Atlanta, back to New Orleans so they could exercise their right to vote. A true man of the people.
But how do you introduce a man of the people to all the people in the middle of a global pandemic?
The answer, as it turned out, was simple and elegant.
Talks With the Reverend
A series of short form, documentary interview style videos allowed us to delve deeper into Reverend Warnock’s life, gave him the ability to answer questions and discuss his stances in his own words, and presented our audience with the opportunity to get to know him on a more intimate level, not from advertisements, but from conversations.
Explaining the Election
After introducing Warnock to the world, the next step was explaining to folks how a special election works. With twenty one candidates and, some from the same party, things can get pretty confusing, and explanations can get pretty boring.
I decided that in the face of so many boring political ads, we should try something different; an animated, colorful video that explains the election in a quick and easy to understand manner.
Quote Graphics
Unfortunately, not everybody is willing to sit through even a three minute video, and sometimes the most effective approach is short and to the point. I utilized text-heavy graphics with attention grabbing visuals to introduce some of our less attentive viewers to the good Reverend.
Georgia Voices
Early on it was decided to run a people powered campaign, not one focused only on our candidate. Our creative team was tasked with translating this into digital content. How do you reach each and every Georgian?
By telling their stories, so we did just that.
The Art of Hype
Once we figured out travel in the middle of a global pandemic, our opportunities for video and photo content expanded immensely. I wanted to take the footage we got on the road of Warnock speaking and interacting with the people, and cut that footage into bite-sized cinematic video content that immediately instilled hope and motivation.
The work on this page is representative of some of the work that I directly created myself, but I have to mention my fantastic creative team, who built on the foundation that I laid out for them and created so much more fantastic content on top of it.
Leo Daube - Content Producer
OJ Wilson - Lead Graphic Designer
Karena Meyer - Graphic Designer
Nabila Pranto - Graphic Designer
Shauna Burton - Social Media Manager
Alyssa Franke - Sr. Social Media Strategist
And also must mention our very supportive Digital Department leadership:
Evan Degnan - Digital Director
Cayana Mackey - Deputy Digital Director
By the end of the campaign were able to see well over thirty million impressions from video content alone, and countless more in other mediums.
Oh, and we made history.