Background
Ask any Speciality Equipment Market Association (SEMA) member and they'll tell you: Their love for cars, trucks and SUVs is their reason for joining SEMA. SEMA members make, buy, sell and use all kinds of specialty parts to ensure their ride reflects their style and unique personality. SEMA works hard to protect the right for consumers to modify their ride and maintain and drive accessorized vehicles. Annually, SEMA throws one of the largest conferences in the world in Las Vegas, showing off the latest and greatest in car tech.
The Situation
In 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposed a new rule that would make it illegal for civilians to modify their vehicle and then drive on public roads. This put SEMA's membership base in jeopardy, whose main passion is modifying their vehicles. SEMA had two goals in mind:
Persuade the EPA to drop the proposed rule
Push a piece of legislation through Congress called Recognizing the Protection of Motorsports Act of 2016 (RPM Act) to protect the future of motorsports for good
Action
We created a digital strategy that mobilized grassroots organizations, urging them to send letters to the EPA and their members of Congress. We used Facebook as our main platform.
We used geo-targeting to deliver custom ads to affected consumers. Our ad copy corresponded with the congressional district we were targeting, creating a personalized ad experience for each constituent. We broke down each district into three segments to correspond with the type of car each constituent would most likely be interested in or drive: hot rods, trucks or drifters. For example, our targeting strategy made it so our ads could target Sen. Mark Warner's constituent, who loved trucks and would be affected by the EPA Rule.
Our digital campaign was fully informed by data. We were able to track how many letters were signed in each congressional district, modify ads that were not performing well and allocate additional resources to increase the performance of our ads. We were also able to target locations where there were racing events and ensure people who had already sent a letter to Congress did not get repeat ads.
Our team created "Lookalike Audiences" to reach audiences beyond SEMA’s original reach by layering targeting profiles on top of those new audiences. Reaching new people who were not familiar with SEMA or the EPA proposed rule was critical and allowed us to increase the number of people who contacted their member of Congress.
Results
The EPA canceled the proposed rule that would have regulated motorsport emissions 24 hours after our campaign launch
The RPM Act gained an additional co-sponsor (Senator Marco Rubio) due to political pressure caused by letters sent to Congress
Over 102.2K people clicked on our ads
Our ads created a 33% lift in total letters sent to Congress and generated over 11.4K letters
We mobilized and activated a series of grassroots organizations
We created a digital toolkit for all seven partner organizations sponsoring the event to include: social content, social graphics and video
