Political Advertising APPLICATION

Identifying the Problem

Down-ballot political campaigns often have small budgets and lack marketing expertise essential to effectively promoting their message. Candidates for positions like school board, city council, and county judge seats are running campaigns themselves with the help of friends and family.

These campaigns would often waste money on digital advertising that consistently hits people outside of their district. From 2018–2021 campaigns were also navigating an evolving digital political advertising environment as social media companies introduced ever-changing verification and disclosure requirements as well as content guidelines. Topplr was built to help campaigns streamline these processes and better target their ads for more effective communications.

Designing the Solution

Topplr was a self-serve voter microtargeting, analytics, and ad-delivery web application that connected directly to political campaign’s Facebook pages. Brandon began supporting Topplr early in the product’s development, coordinating user interviews and responding to tech support requests. These insights informed product roadmap meetings Brandon led. Over the course of his time working on the product Brandon conducted user interviews, coordinated interface testing sessions, created prototypes, and quality tested a wide variety of product updates.

Some of the key functionality Brandon helped launch was the integration of public voter file information into the product, new onboarding flows for meeting and communicating Facebook’s political advertising requirements, and an overhaul of the interface through which users reviewed their advertisements’ performance.

Topplr won the Gold Pollie for Best Ad Technology Innovation from the American Association of Political Consultants in 2020 and was a nominee for Campaigns and Elections’ Most Innovative Product award in 2019.