Political Branding and Storytelling
Reid Hettich’s Aurora City Council Representative Race for Ward 1
Reid Hettich is a NW Aurora resident who has called the 80010 community his home for three decades and who has also been a leader within that community for about just as long! When Reid decided to run for Aurora City Council representing Ward 1, he tapped me to produce a significant amount of his digital media branding content for his website, social media accounts, and print fliers. As you might expect, a race for a smaller office commands a smaller budget, and so devising a plan to produce a large amount of compelling and professional videos, photos, and copywriting relative to the campaign’s relative amount of resources was crucial.
Here’s how I got it done by producing a series of long form videos and photo portraits that could then be deconstructed and reused for additional content.
Step 1 - Producing the Videos
While discussing how to best capture, and present, Reid Hettich’s character to his would-be constituents, it was decided that he was at his best when he was interacting with the general public. Inspired by the “Subway Takes” series by Kareem Rahma, I then set forth to produce a series of long-form videos videos that featured Reid being interviewed by a number of NW Aurora residents from a variety of backgrounds. The benefits of this format were that the videos (each one totalling about 15 minutes in length) could be edited down into smaller, more social media friendly segments (as seen here), transcripts could be created from the videos after the fact giving us a trove of soundbites to be used for additional social media posts (as seen below), still images from the videos could be pulled for even more social media content, and the interviews provided Reid an opportunity to meet and create a positive impression with voters that he had not met with previously.
Step 2 - Combining Video Soundbites with Photo Portraits
Using my video editing software’s “Auto-Transcription” feature, I converted all of the dialogue spoken through the interviews into text, and then identified the most engaging soundbites to used for social media imagery.
Additional Promotional Materials and Activities
Candidate Meet-and-Greet Photo Coverage
“Ask-Me-Anything” on r/Aurora
Oh, and hey, I also went the extra mile in producing an “AMA” on the Aurora, Colorado subreddit. An “AMA” is a user-submitted event on Reddit that allows the general public to “Ask Anything” to notable individuals, similar to a digital town hall but with no preliminary filtering on questions, completely remote, and usually held over the course of an extended amount of time such as an entire day or even an entire week. This activity provided yet another platform to Reid, that he was previously unfamiliar with, to meet and engage with members of the NW Aurora community. A Mockup of a “GQ” magazine featuring Reid Hettich and outlining his positions and previous successes within was designed to generate interest.
Voting Week Videos
Finally, with one week to go before the voting booths closed, I was commissioned to create two more videos within a 48 hour window with the remaining campaign funds. With so little time at our disposal, I decided to create one video to generate excitement for Reid Hettich, and another video featuring Reid Hettich to generate excitement for voting in the general sense while also providing voters information on where the ballot boxes within the 80010 community were located.
