Our clients are fighting hard each day to make America — and indeed the world — a better place. It’s an honor to be there fighting alongside them. And it’s always inspiring to see our partnerships honored for their impactful and innovative work.

Just days ago, Campaigns & Elections hosted the 2017 Reed Awards in Las Vegas, to honor advocacy and electoral campaigns that made an impact over the past year. We couldn’t be prouder to let you know that DSPolitical and our clients were honored with four major awards for our work in 2016. Even more exciting, our industry-leading self-serve voter targeted digital ad platform, DemocraticAds.com, received top honors and was recognized for its involvement in a pair of award-winning campaigns.

Working with our friends at Strother Nuckles Strategies, we helped Informing Arkansas pass Issue 6, which legalized marijuana use for 17 qualifying conditions in the state. The campaign was awarded the 2017 Reed Award for “Best Use of Online Targeting for a Ballot Initiative”.

Informing Arkansas had a very tricky path to victory. They needed to speak to voters across party lines that would support medical marijuana, but the voters they needed to reach could easily be turned off by the wrong messages — not to mention enraging marijuana opponents. Together, DSPolitical and Strother Nuckles Strategies put together a precisely targeted online video and display plan that utilized not just marijuana support modeling scores, but also model scores indicating their amount of TV use, to target six different messages to six different critical target groups. Ultimately, Issue 6 was approved with 53% of the vote in a very conservative state.

Austin Independent School District Boardmember Cindy Anderson and DSPolitical were honored with the Reed Award for “Best Use of Online Targeting for County, Local, Mayoral or Judicial Campaign.” Her innovative use of DemocraticAds.com‘s groundbreaking integration with NGP VAN’s platform removed early voters from her target list since they had already voted. That way Anderson was able to focus her ads ONLY on voters who still needed to get out and vote by November 8th.

Anderson’s award wasn’t the end of the evening for DemocraticAds.com, though. It also received the 2017 Reed Award for “Best Use of a Self-Serve Platform” for helping the Alaska House Democratic Caucus target their negative ads efficiently and effectively across Alaska’s very complicated media markets. By utilizing their custom lists, and a customized platform (AKDemocraticAds.com) they took down two Republicans, and now enjoy effective control of the Alaska House.

Finally, DemocraticAds.com‘s industry-leading ease-of-use, unparalleled reporting tools, and rapid list-matching was recognized with the Reed Award for “Best Self-Serve Platform”. We couldn’t be prouder to have helped over 500 campaigns use this platform to serve over 50 million impressions in all 50 states in 2016.

DSPolitical’s DemocraticAds.com has truly democratized (in both senses of the word) online advertising for candidates and causes up-and-down the ballot, and we were honored to be recognized by our industry for the truly groundbreaking work it has accomplished.