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Winning Voters’ Support for Fargo’s Future

In 2023 voters took to the polls for a combined measure that tied Fargodome renovations and the building of a new convention center together. These projects would have been jointly funded by a local sales tax increase. After voters rejected the combined measure, the two proposals were separated for the 2024 election season with Visit Fargo-Moohread spearheading the ballot initiative to fund construction of a new convention center via an increase of the local lodging tax from 3% to 6%. As such, Visit Fargo-Moorhead partnered with Absolute Studios to create a mass media and PR campaign to educate voters on the new measure prior to heading to the polls on November 5th, 2024.

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Challenges

With an initial ballot measure failing to pass tied to a sales tax increase along with the aforementioned Fargodome renovations, Visit Fargo-Moorhead needed to educate the public on this new, separate ballot initiative to be funded mostly by out-of-city patrons staying in local hotels. The messaging needed to be clear, concise, and reach a wide breadth of voters across the metro area.

Approach

Step one involved crafting a multi-media approach across a wide array of platforms. This included television, radio, billboards, social media, and other digital channels likely voters might be. Absolute’s media team crafted a plan that leveraged the following platforms:

  • Television – We leveraged local news programming with regional leaders like KVLY, KXJB, and WDAY. We also looked to high-impact programming like Sunday Night Football and Saturday Night Live. Lastly, we sought to reach those most likely to vote with a cable tv campaign focused solely on the major news networks, Fox News Channel, MSNBC, and CNN.
  • Radio – We crafted a campaign focused on reach and frequency with leading talk radio platforms like KFGO, The Flag, and Radio FM.
  • Digital Billboards – We worked with the two major digital billboard vendors in the FM area to create a campaign that would rotate through the metro area in some of the city’s busiest corridors.
  • Print/Digital – We leveraged the region’s leading newspaper, The Fargo Forum, to place a series of print ads in the physical version of their newspaper. We also implemented a strong digital strategy as well through a series of display ads on InForum.com and multiple days of an InForum.com takeover where our messaging was prominently displayed on the site’s homepage during it’s statistically highest traffic days.
  • Social Media – We crafted a blanket-effect social media strategy leveraging video content, animated display ads, and carousel ads across platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram (including Reels), YouTube, YouTube Shorts, and Reddit.
    CTV/OTT – We leveraged leading streaming platforms like Hulu to serve non-skippable video ads using geolocation and audience interest targeting.
  • AMA – We helped set up and guide an Ask Me Anything on Reddit to interact live with those who had thoughts and questions about the new proposal.
  • Public Relations – Finally, we utilized in-house software to get our messaging out to regional reports and media vendors highlighting both informational content pertaining to the upcoming vote and public events throughout the community led by Visit Fargo-Moorhead’s amazing team of professionals. As such, we were able to track open rates, click-through rates, and responses in one easily accessible and integrated system.

Once a media plan was in place, it came time to build standout creative assets to amplify the key messaging Visit Fargo-Moorhead wished to disseminate to the public. This included animated videos that highlighted both the new convention center and Fargo as a whole, digital billboards, animated display ads, custom graphics for the digital versions of our InForum ads, print ads, and radio commercials. Multiple versions were produced to highlight the following:

  • What is a lodging tax and how would an increase impact the voter?
  • What benefits would a new convention center bring to the Fargo-Moorhead area?
  • How have other new convention centers financially impacted their local community using case studies from places like Madison, WI and Rochester, MN?

Given the political classification of these ads, Absolute worked with Visit Fargo-Moorhead, their team of lawyers, and our media partners to craft alternate versions of all assets to account for specific vagaries in legal requirements across all platforms.

Execution

Working with Visit Fargo-Moorhead, we crafted a 12-week media plan with a J-curve strategy. This meant the first trimester of our campaign would see the second highest spend level so as to inform the public of the upcoming ballot measure while educating voters from the early onset. The second trimester saw a cut in spending allowing us to allocate the largest portion of our media budget for the final stretch of the campaign when voters are more likely to be researching ballot measures in anticipation of voting while leveraging the all too crucial concept of recency bias. The last third of our campaign saw a massive push across all platforms in order to reach people anywhere they might be consuming media.

Key Takeaways

On November 5th, 2024, voters approved the Fargo lodging tax measure by a 51.63% to 48.37% margin. Needing a simple majority to pass, the ballot measure was approved allowing Visit Fargo-Moorhead to move onto the next phase of their efforts which include soliciting proposals for potential sites, designs, and added features like a hotel that would be built alongside of it. Interestingly, the Fargodome renovation measure still tied to a local sales tax increase failed by nearly a reciprocal margin, 47.67% in favor and 52.33% opposed.

Overall, the campaign generated 2,271,600 trackable impressions. These figures do not include more traditional platforms like television, radio, and digital billboards. 23,914 visited a more detailed landing page on the Visit Fargo-Moorhead website representing 43.5% of the total voter turnout in the 2024 election.

Fargo Lodging Tax Results

%

51.63% Yes | 48.37% No

Fargodome Sales Tax

%

47.67% Yes | 52.33% No

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