Campus Media Ad Spend: Higher Investment Produces Stronger Turnout Outcomes

Methodology

The 2018 analysis was conducted by BlueLabs in partnership with flytedesk, covering 123 target-match campus pairs from the 2018 midterm election cycle. Final voter file analysis used 64 pairs after removing campuses where data quality or cross-state comparisons introduced unresolvable bias. Survey data drawn from 563 student respondents matched to the voter file.

The 2020 analysis was conducted by Pantheon Analytics in partnership with flytedesk across 39 campuses and 13 states. Students were categorized by campus-level spend per student, and outcomes were compared across spend tiers. Findings from both studies are directional, given the observational and matched-campus designs.

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Findings

Recall increased with spend: The 2018 analysis found that recall was generally high across all targeted campuses, but the lift in recall (the difference between targeted and match campuses) was meaningfully larger on campuses where flytedesk advertising costs exceeded $2,000.

Turnout scaled with investment: The 2018 analysis found that campuses with higher flytedesk investment saw greater increases in turnout relative to their match campuses. The marginal return on investment declined as spending increased, but the analysis found no evidence of diminishing returns within the range of typical program budgets.

Voter motivation scaled with investment: The 2020 analysis found a consistent relationship between spend levels and voter motivation. Among students on campuses with no flytedesk spend, 65.3% reported feeling extremely motivated to vote. That figure rose to 67.1% at low-spend campuses, 71.6% at mid-spend campuses, and 77.3% at the highest-spend campuses.

Higher spend correlated with earlier voting: Higher-spend campuses produced students who were more likely to vote before Election Day. At the highest-spend campuses, 85.6% of students who voted reported doing so by mail, drop box, or early in-person voting, compared to 75.4% at campuses with no flytedesk investment.

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Implications for Program Design

More spend produces better outcomes: The two studies point to the same conclusion: more spend produces better turnout-related outcomes.

Keep media spend at $2+ per student: Taken together, the two studies point to $2 per student per message as a floor for effective investment. Above it, each additional investment level produced measurable gains across recall, motivation, and turnout. Programs operating at minimal spend levels are likely leaving impact on the table.