A separate and unrelated engagement to our party work: an independent candidate challenging a long-held federal seat in the 2022 election, with no party machine behind the media buy, no existing name recognition, and a compressed flight from 10 April to 21 May. Voters had to learn who she was, what she stood for, and how to vote for her — in that order, in six weeks, against an incumbent with decades of brand equity.
We built the paid program around what Curtin voters were actually doing: typing her name and asking what an independent stands for. Search captured that intent from the moment awareness started to build; display and video carried recognition across the electorate boundary; and creative answered the three questions in sequence — who, what, how — rather than shouting one slogan for six weeks. Preferential-voting explainer creative did real work in the final fortnight. Every placement carried correct authorisation.
Google Ads search, display and video geo-fenced to the electorate boundary · programmatic at suburb and booth level · sequenced creative (recognition → position → how to vote) · pre-poll and election-eve scheduling · authorisation and disclosure compliance on every placement · daily performance reporting read as proportional metrics.
The campaign was managed against daily Google Ads reporting for the full 10 April – 21 May 2022 flight, read as ratios rather than raw volume: share of impressions inside the electorate, click-through rate by query theme, cost movement as auction pressure climbed toward polling day, and the device and time-of-day split that showed when the electorate was paying attention. Budget was reallocated on that evidence — day by day in the closing week, hour by hour on pre-poll and election eve. The same read today runs with AI-assisted anomaly detection over the daily export, so a shift in query mix surfaces within hours rather than at the next report. The analysis is AI-assisted; the political judgement is not.
Same-day issue monitoring to inform rapid response, and AI-assisted reading of daily campaign telemetry — to brief human strategists, never to generate political messaging.