Work on Behalf of Ready for Hillary Recognized

Washington, D.C. – Over the weekend, Rising Tide Interactive – the nation’s leading Democratic digital strategy and advertising firm – won “Best Use of Email or Viral Marketing” and “Best Spanish Language Online Ad” at the 2015 Reed Awards for its work on behalf of Ready for Hillary, a nationwide grassroots movement of over three million supporters and over 120,000 grassroots donors encouraging the former Secretary of State to run for president in 2016.

The Reed Awards are named after Campaigns & Elections magazine founder Stanley Foster Reed. The awards recognize excellence in political campaigning, campaign management, political consulting, and political design. Chosen from the largest and smallest organizations in the industry, the winners represent the best in the industry from across more than 100 categories for television, radio, direct mail, phones, field, political technology, and online advertising.

“Ready for Hillary has been successful, first and foremost, because of the enthusiasm of millions of Americans for a Hillary Clinton presidency. It has been an honor for us to develop new and interesting ways to harness that enthusiasm as we build a grassroots army encouraging her to seek the presidency in 2016,” said Eli Kaplan, a partner at Rising Tide Interactive.

About The Work that Won

Best Use of Email or Viral Marketing:

Obama for America’s 2012 email marketing program was successful in part because the President’s team never stopped organizing after 2008 and as a result, had a huge list to turn to for his reelection. Hillary Clinton had to give up all of her political infrastructure when she became Secretary of State. Ready for Hillary has built enormous email and grassroots donor list so that Clinton will have an army of supporters ready if and when she decided to run. Rising Tide Interactive’s email and viral marketing programs have generated millions of sign-ups, over 80,000 grassroots donors, and raised millions of dollars for the Ready for Hillary super PAC. This type of organization is completely unprecedented in American politics. No super PAC has ever focused on low-dollar fundraising with such success, nor has one focused on funding grassroots infrastructure instead of large television buys.

Best Spanish Language Online Ad:

Ready for Hillary organized a “Latinos for Hillary” constituency group to mobilize an army of supporters within the Latino community who will be ready if and when Hillary Clinton decides to run for president. To help in that effort, Rising Tide Interactive ran targeted advertisements to Spanish speakers encouraging them to join the group. Those who clicked on the ads were directed to a landing page where they were asked to enter their email addresses in order to pledge their support for Clinton. What made the effort truly unique was the way Spanish language internet users were targeted. Rather than than focus on Spanish surnames, the advertisements were mostly based on language settings; if users changed the default language of Google.com or their browser to Spanish, Rising Tide Interactive would serve those users ads in Spanish on sites across the Internet. Websites published in Spanish were also targeted. In total, 15 million impressions helped generate thousands of sign-ups for Ready for Hillary’s Latinos for Hillary constituency group.