It’s common to see digital ads being used to speak to the masses. But what if progressives and activists flipped this model to help the masses speak to people in power?
The Challenge
How do activists cut through corporate barriers and reach the people in power? Traditional methods often fall short, with gatekeepers standing between advocates and decision-makers. This was the challenge faced by Indigenous activist Beka Saw Munduruku in 2023.
Beka traveled over 4,000 miles to ask the agriculture giant Cargill to stop its deforestation of her homeland in the Brazilian Amazon. By traveling to their headquarters in Minneapolis, Minnesota, she hoped to speak with the Cargill leadership face-to-face about their environmental destruction and the threat it poses to the survival of her people.
Unfortunately, Beka’s journey was cut short before she could get past the Cargill office’s parking lot. Security guards denied her access to the building. She handed them the open letter she had written to Cargill’s leadership. You won’t be surprised to hear that she never got a response. This is a story that echoes the struggles of countless activists worldwide.
Strategy
While Beka couldn’t get past security, her message did. Stand.earth, an international climate advocacy organization, turned to Advocate, our self-service digital ads platform, to bypass the physical barriers that stood in her way.
Stand.earth launched targeted digital ad campaigns directed at Cargill’s leadership, ensuring Beka’s message couldn’t be ignored.
- Targeting Strategy: Using geo-targeting, the ads appeared directly where Cargill executives would see them—from their offices to their personal devices. We also used data on clicks and video completions to create a retargeting audience, which allowed us to show more ads to people who engaged with our content.
- Channels Used: Programmatic display, video, and native ads maximized engagement with key decision-makers. Search ads were shown to people who searched for the names of any Cargill executive, which applied pressure on our target audience by shedding light on the deforestation and destruction that are part of their legacy.
The Results
The campaign achieved outstanding metrics:
- High Engagement: This multi-channel approach ensured the message stayed top-of-mind. Our 53% video completion rate and 0.21% click-through rate were both well over our benchmarks, demonstrating strong resonance with the target audience.
- Amplified Impact: Beka’s story reached the very executives who had denied her entry, ensuring her voice was heard despite physical barriers.
- Outcome: After our campaigns, Cargill put out a press release promising to eliminate deforestation from its supply chain by 2025, indicating that the company felt the pressure Stand.Earth meant to apply. It’s important to recognize that activists are still calling on the company to keep this promise. As they continue their movement to protect endangered ecosystems, we are honored that Advocate is one of the tools they rely upon to reach their target audiences.
Beka’s story reflects a broader struggle to speak truth to power in our society. It’s all too easy for people in power to evade accountability. But anyone who’s online can be reached using our wide range of programmatic inventory and geo-targeting capabilities, which makes Advocate a key tool in helping progressive movements be heard by people in power.
The People’s Vaccine Alliance, for example, targeted ads about the urgent need for vaccine equity to President Biden, members of the UK Parliament, the UN General Assembly, and big pharma execs. And in Denmark, the food workers’ union NNF ran an Advocate campaign which showed members of Parliament ads pushing for crucial animal welfare regulations.
Advocate is special because it requires no minimum spend, so organizations of any size have the opportunity to harness the power of digital ads. And our user-friendly interface, built by and for progressives, makes complex campaigns easy to set up and run.
If you’d like to learn more about how we can help you reach the people you want on your side, please contact our team here!
