Shifting Perception: How Smart Media Buying Drove Favorability for a Third-Rail Cause

An issue-based PAC came to IMGE with a difficult brief: improve public favorability for a federal agency facing historic perception challenges after taking a stand on the organization's key issue.

Public opinion was entrenched and highly charged. The agency had become a political lightning rod, and the PAC needed to shift how real voters in real swing states actually felt about it.

The KPI wasn't impressions or reach. It was opinion change, measured by an independent brand lift study and validated by real-world sentiment tracking. Every dollar, every placement, and every creative decision had to be optimized for persuasion, not vanity metrics.

Campaign at a Glance

• Platforms: Connected TV + Meta (Display & Video)
• Markets: Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina
• Total Impressions: 104M+
• Meta Engagements: 3.3M+
• CTV Completions: 27M+
• Measurement: Independent brand lift study (Lucid/Cint, ~4,000 respondents)

How We Did It: Smart Media Buying Meets Precision Targeting

Most campaigns in this space default to broad reach plays — big budgets, wide audiences, and a general "spray and pray" strategy. We took a more focused, strategic approach. Three key decisions set the strategy for our persuasion campaign.

Strategic Decision #1: Run on CTV/OTT for Non-Skippable, High-Attention Environments

Connected TV was the campaign's anchor. When the goal is persuasion, you need people to actually see and absorb the message. That means non-skippable, full-screen video in environments where viewers are leaned in and paying attention.

We deliberately focused on premium CTV inventory with low ad loads. These are environments where fewer ads compete for attention, which means each spot carries more weight. Viewers in these environments aren't just "reached" in the way a programmatic display ad reaches someone. They're sitting on their couch, watching content they chose, in a lean-back environment where they're actually absorbing what's on screen. For a persuasion campaign, that context matters enormously.

We placed across top-tier publishers including ESPN, Fox Entertainment, and NBCU through premium providers like DirecTV, Roku, Sling, and Spectrum.

Strategic Decision #2: Run on Meta to Enhance Reach and Dominate the Second Screen

Paid social played a complementary role. Meta gave us powerful reach and the ability to deliver full-screen creative to our audience outside the TV screen, meeting voters in the environments where they spend the most time. The targeting capabilities and ad formats on Meta — particularly vertical video in Reels and Stories — let us deliver high-impact creative at scale.

The bigger story on Meta was creative format. We didn't repurpose TV spots for social. We built purpose-native 9×16 vertical video for Reels and Stories, alongside display for feed placements. The performance gap was significant:

VCR = Video Completion Rate (ThruPlays ÷ Total Video Plays). Thumbstop Ratio = (3-Second Video Plays ÷ Impressions) × 1,000. A higher thumbstop ratio means more people stopped scrolling to watch. For context, anything above 100 is considered strong.

Reels placements delivered a 3× higher engagement rate than feed (9.0% vs. 3.0%). Facebook Reels hit 11.4% engagement, which is nearly 6× the platform average of ~2%. The thumbstop data tells the same story: Facebook Reels posted a 185.6 thumbstop ratio, nearly double feed (104.0) and more than 3× Instagram Stories (53.6). People weren't just seeing the ads. They were stopping to watch them.

Video creative overall drove a 10.5% engagement rate vs. 0.5% for display, and it did so at a lower CPM ($13.23 vs. $15.52). Better performance, cheaper delivery. That's smart media buying on Meta.

In total, 66M Meta impressions generated 3.3M engagements at $0.29 per engagement and an estimated 770K ad recall lift.

Strategic Decision #3: Find the Persuadable with Proprietary Audience Targeting

Reach without precision is just noise. The hardest part of a persuasion campaign isn't serving the ads — it's finding the people whose minds can actually be changed.

IMGE layered Increment, our in-house persuadability model, alongside established third-party audience data. Increment distills behavioral and attitudinal signals to identify voters who are genuinely persuadable on a given issue, rather than relying on broad demographic proxies. The campaign wasn't just reaching "persuadable voters" as defined by a vendor's off-the-shelf segment. It was reaching people IMGE's own data indicated had real capacity to move.

The audience strategy was the connective tissue between platforms. The same precision targeting informed both CTV and Meta buys, ensuring message consistency across touchpoints and maximizing the chance that a voter who saw the CTV spot also encountered reinforcing creative on social.

The Results

An independent brand lift study conducted by Lucid/Cint confirmed the campaign delivered statistically significant lifts across all three KPIs — brand favorability, ad recall, and brand awareness — all at 90% confidence.

✓ = Statistically significant at 90% confidence | n = 1,796

Some context on those numbers: the +3.7 point favorability lift exceeds the industry median of approximately 3 points across 1,650+ measured campaigns, according to DISQO's ad effectiveness benchmarks. Meta's +9.0 point ad recall lift is well above typical benchmarks for political-focused campaigns.

Real-world sentiment tracking backed this up: a 16.5% improvement in net sentiment since the program's start and a 20% decline in negative opinion.

Words for the Wise

• You can't buy persuasion with impressions alone. Smart media buying means putting the right message in front of the right people in environments where they'll actually pay attention.
• Format-native creative isn't a nice-to-have. It's a 3× multiplier. Build for the platform or accept a fraction of the impact.
• When the issue is polarizing and the stakes are real, off-the-shelf audiences aren't enough. Finding the persuadable is the job. Everything else is just media.