WLP, a political consultancy with deep ties to California’s sustainability sector, partnered with Propellant Media to deliver a highly targeted, time-sensitive digital campaign focused on legislative influence. The objective: raise visibility around key agricultural issues and test which political and regulatory audiences were most receptive to specific advocacy narratives.
The client provided a complex set of resources—over 10 tabs of spreadsheet-based contact data, policy targets, and a general campaign outline—only days before the scheduled campaign launch. These included email records, building addresses, and segmented audience categories such as legislators, boards, supervisors, regulators, and local policy groups.
Strategic Challenge
This campaign required advanced segmentation, data activation, and tactical deployment under tight deadlines. Key challenges included:
- Limited data quality: Government emails often have low match rates for digital platforms due to privacy restrictions
- Granular audience needs: The client required performance metrics per audience, meaning each had to be isolated as its own campaign
- Compressed prep window: Strategy and assets were provided days before the campaign needed to be live
- Creative testing: Four unique videos had to be mapped across audiences for engagement testing (watch rate)
Our Strategy Developed For California Strawberry Commission
Propellant Media quickly translated WLP’s raw data and campaign framework into a multi-layered digital engagement strategy built entirely within programmatic and video ad platforms. Using combinations of CRM retargeting, addressable geofencing, curated demographic audiences, and manually drawn custom fences, we executed six simultaneous campaigns—each with its own creative strategy and KPI tracking.
Audience Activation Strategy
- CRM Email Retargeting: Uploaded 1,000+ government-affiliated contacts across all tabs to match as many email-based users as possible. (~500–650 matched)
- Addressable Geofencing (AGF): Used parcel-level data to match buildings (e.g., Board of Supervisors offices), delivering to ~20K+ users inside known government buildings
- Custom Geofencing (GF): Mapped legislative buildings and regulators’ offices (e.g., CalEPA, Newsom’s Office, Senate/Assembly buildings) where unique address data was insufficient
- Audience Curation by ZIP Code: Built a Growers audience from ZIPs + demographic overlays to reach households fitting agricultural profiles
Each tactic was tagged and tracked separately, enabling full performance comparison across all campaigns and audience types.
Creative Strategy We Leveraged
- Four distinct video ads were deployed across all campaigns
- Videos varied in tone: emotional storytelling, personal narrative, informational, and policy-focused
- Main KPI: Video engagement (watch rate), used as a proxy for message resonance and audience interest
- Creative matched campaign intent (e.g., “It’s Personal 3D” for emotionally driven messaging; “100% Recyclable” for policy angles)
Key Outcomes
- 100% of budget deployed within 30 days, with full optimization against top-performing audiences
- 20,000 impressions delivered to government buildings, supervisors’ offices, and legislative complexes
- Identified strongest video-audience pairings by comparing watch rates across campaign segments
- Delivered weekly engagement reports with heatmaps and audience engagement breakdowns
- Helped client refine long-term audience targeting strategy for future policy initiatives
- We continue to work with this client and have been for over 8 months
Why This Campaign Worked
- Granular Strategy, Executed at Speed: Built six campaigns from scratch in under 72 hours from raw spreadsheets and creative notes
- Audience Intelligence Built In: Gave WLP the insights they needed—which messages resonated with which policymakers—via performance data
- Trusted Political Partner: WLP awarded Propellant Media their entire paid media portfolio following this campaign, based on 3+ years of consistent delivery, speed, and strategic value