THE LINCOLN PROJECT'S RICK WILSON ON THE ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORKED

[Gothmog]

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he Lincoln Project, of course, pumped out a lot of ads—with such finesse and success, under Wilson’s creative direction, that Ad Age has named the PAC one of 2020’s Marketers of the Year. In this in-depth conversation, Wilson (speaking by phone from his home in Tallahassee, Fla.) reveals some of the art and science behind TLP’s barrage of remarkable, agenda-setting, viral political ads.....

Do you have a specific sense of how much you moved the needle?
We have very specific metrics in Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that we played a decisive role.

And what does that data show? Who did you shift?
We moved former Republicans, independents and current Republicans over what we call the Bannon Line. Steve Bannon, who is no fan of us, said, early in the process, if these guys can move 2% or 3% of the Republican vote, Trump is gonna lose. Well, from the metrics we’re showing, in the swing states, where we spent I would say 80% to 85% of our resources, we moved the Bannon Line, and crossover Republican votes, between 9% and 13%.

That is a huge accomplishment. We are enormously proud of the work we did. We played, as we said from the very beginning, a game of small numbers. I was not out there trying to convert Trump voters. I was not, for the most part, trying to fire up Democratic voters. We were building a campaign from the very start that was meant to do certain things. The No. 1 thing was blocking. We saw already that a lot of Republicans had drifted away from the party in 2018. And they were primarily female, they were primarily better educated.