Optimum Media’s Guide to Smarter Voter Mobilization

As we move closer to Election Day, mobilizing your voter base and getting out the vote (GOTV) requires more strategic media plans. It’s no longer enough to know whether a campaign is pacing against plan. We also need to understand whether the media mix is reaching the right voters, with the right frequency, where they spend their time.

Audiences are more fragmented than ever, and each race’s dynamics can change quickly. That makes behavioral and performance data essential for spotting gaps in the current media mix and identifying where the next dollar can make the biggest difference.

To explore further, we sat down with Mona El Halabi, account executive, to discuss five things to consider as we enter the final stretch.

Her perspective comes from years of leading Optimum Media’s client services team and overseeing thousands of political and issue campaigns from planning through wrap. For Mona, that operator’s perspective still shapes how she approaches media planning today.

1. Start with the audience, not the platform.

Voters move across linear TV, CTV, YouTube, social, and digital, so media planning can’t happen platform by platform. Before deciding allocation, start with the audience:

• Who are we reaching, and how often?

• Where are we duplicating exposure?

• Who are we still missing?

Each platform should have a clear role in the plan. CTV can extend reach beyond linear, social can reinforce a message with a specific segment, and digital can add precision or flexibility where other media may fall short. The goal isn’t to maximize one platform over another; it’s to build the right mix to maximize the audience reached. 

Cord-cutters are a good example. Across the five battleground states we analyzed, our proprietary set-top-box and smart TV data show more than one in five voters fall into our cord-cutter segment, rising to nearly one in four in Arizona and Georgia. 

Across the five battleground states we analyzed using proprietary set-top-box and smart TV data, more than 1 in 5 voters are classified as cord-cutters, rising to nearly 1 in 4 in Arizona and Georgia. That’s too much of the electorate to leave behind with a linear-heavy strategy. Use viewing data to understand where those voters are actually spending time, and build the mix around the reach gap.

The goal isn’t to be everywhere. It’s to understand what each platform adds and where it fills a gap.

2. Let behavior challenge the plan.

To expand on the previous idea, demographics and voter models matter, but they shouldn’t be the only factors guiding media decisions. Viewing behavior can reveal opportunities that traditional planning assumptions miss.

Let’s look at non-college-educated voters: the audience is sizable, roughly 1 in 3 voters in the battleground states we analyzed, but their sports viewing habits vary considerably by market. MLB over-indexes most in Pennsylvania, NHL in Michigan, and MMA in Arizona. 

For GOTV, sports can reveal meaningful differences. NFL and college football may be obvious fall tentpoles, but unexpected affinities can be just as valuable. Among Latino adults 18 and older, for example, our internal data shows they’re 10 times more likely to watch MMA than other audiences.

The takeaway isn’t to automatically buy MMA. It’s to use behavior to test assumptions and give every part of the plan a clear purpose. Demographics can tell you who an audience is, but viewing data can show where their attention actually is. The goal is to find environments where an audience is more engaged than you might expect, and use that insight to make the plan smarter. 

3. Make reporting decision-ready.

Pacing, reach, and frequency all matter, but you need to view them in context.

A line pacing behind may need optimization, or it may signal something about inventory, the audience, or where the broader plan should move next. The goal isn’t to make the line look perfect on a report; it’s to make better decisions.

As GOTV approaches, reporting should help answer a few essential questions:

• Who are we reaching?

• Who are we missing?

• What is adding incremental reach?

• Where is frequency building?

• Where can dollars shift?

On a recent campaign, reach continued to grow week over week while frequency held relatively steady at ~1. That signals that additional impressions were still reaching new voters rather than simply adding repetition. 

If a report doesn’t help answer those questions, it may not belong in the process.

4. Know what the next dollar needs to do.

The cheapest impression isn’t always the most valuable one. A better question is: What does the next dollar need to accomplish?

An internal study found the optimal ad-frequency “sweet spot” is seven exposures. This gives planners a useful benchmark for when additional impressions still add value and when to shift dollars elsewhere.

• If reach is still expanding, prioritize scale.

• If frequency is building too quickly, it may be time to find a new audience.

• If one platform has plateaued, use another to extend reach to households it isn’t reaching today.

This is especially important when evaluating linear TV and CTV together. CTV should earn its place by adding incremental reach, helping manage frequency, or reaching voters the rest of the video plan misses — not simply because streaming is growing.

5. Build flexibility into the plan.

Race dynamics, budgets, and creative can all change quickly. A plan with no optionality may look organized on day one, but it becomes difficult to manage when dollars need to move immediately.

Protect scarce or strategically important inventory, identify where incremental dollars can go, and avoid structuring the plan so tightly that every adjustment requires starting over.

That flexibility is one of digital media’s biggest advantages, particularly as campaigns move from persuasion into GOTV. The plan that made sense six weeks ago may not be the right plan in the final days before Election Day. CTV is built for that kind of flexibility, letting campaigns reallocate weight as audiences, inventory, performance, and priorities shift. 

Keep asking:

• Who still needs to hear from us?

• Who are we already reaching effectively?

• Where are we seeing diminishing returns?

• What can the next dollar add that the last one didn’t?

The strongest plans won’t be the ones that predicted every change months in advance. They’ll be the ones built to learn, adapt, and improve as the race evolves. 

By GOTV, flexibility shouldn’t be Plan B. It should already be part of Plan A.

As we move into the final stretch, the strongest plans don’t start with specific platforms or chasing the cheapest impressions; they start with a multiplatform partner that brings together audience data, transparent measurement, and the flexibility to optimize as things change. As inventory tightens closer to Election Day, let’s strategize now to help secure the opportunities that matter most. 

Mona El Halabi partners with campaigns and agencies to build strategic, data-driven media plans across CTV, live sports, and digital. Bringing more than eight years of advertising experience and a background in leading client services, overseeing campaigns from planning and launch through optimization and wrap, she brings an operator’s perspective to media strategy, with a focus on building plans that are smart on day one, but flexible enough to keep up when priorities, audiences, budgets, and market conditions inevitably shift.