Civic Nation Turns Midterm Voting Into a Party With Celebrate Your Way
Civic Nation's "Celebrate Your Way" campaign, created by Phenomenon and launched in October 2018 in the United States, used two short films to reframe voting in the November 6 midterm elections as a shared social occasion rather than a solitary civic obligation, anchored by the nonpartisan #VoteTogether initiative.
The campaign launched on October 16, 2018, one day before its public announcement, and comprised exactly two film assets distributed across social and digital channels. The first, a 90-second narrative film titled "Jenny's Dead," used dark comic misdirection to pull audiences into an unexpected setting before landing on its voting message. The second, a 15-second film titled "Celebrate Your Way," delivered a more direct celebratory proposition. Together, the two pieces formed a tonal pairing — one surprising, one affirming — designed to reach audiences who might otherwise scroll past conventional civic messaging.
Phenomenon developed the creative under a strategic proposition rooted in Civic Nation's existing #VoteTogether program, which had grown from nine voting celebrations in 2016 to 57 in 2017, according to jaygelardi.com. In 2018, Civic Nation targeted approximately 500 to 800 voting parties for the midterm cycle, per marketingdive.com. The production effort sat within a broader agency partnership: Phenomenon handled the creative work, Mekanism managed digital advertising and lead generation, BerlinRosen led email, social, SMS, and website activity, and DKC handled public relations, as documented by prnewswire.com. The campaign's geographic scope was the United States, specifically timed to mobilise participation ahead of the November 6, 2018 midterm elections. Clapboard rates this campaign 63 out of 100, reflecting a creatively distinctive execution that operated within the structural constraints of a short-cycle civic mobilisation effort.
Civic Nation's core strategic premise was behavioural. The organisation presented evidence that hosting a voting party could increase voter turnout by six percent, a figure cited as campaign rationale rather than a post-campaign result, as documented by jaygelardi.com. This premise shifted the creative brief away from traditional civic advertising — which typically appeals to individual duty — and toward social identity and peer motivation. If voting became something friends did together, the argument ran, the activation barrier would fall.
The United States midterm election cycle presented a specific context. Midterm turnout among younger voters has historically lagged behind presidential-year participation. CIRCLE, the Centre for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, estimated that 31 percent of Americans aged 18 to 29 voted in the 2018 midterms, a figure that represented a notable increase over prior midterm cycles, according to CIRCLE's published research. Civic Nation's #VoteTogether program positioned itself to reach this demographic by making the social dimension of voting visible and aspirational rather than obligatory.
In the United States public service advertising market, campaigns targeting civic participation compete for attention against commercially funded entertainment content on the same digital and social platforms. Nonpartisan civic initiatives such as When We All Vote — co-chaired by Michelle Obama and also active in 2018 — and Vote.org's digital mobilisation programs represented parallel efforts in the same space, each competing for the same voter attention with different creative and distribution strategies. Phenomenon's decision to lead with narrative film, rather than informational content or celebrity appeals alone, reflected a deliberate attempt to earn attention rather than purchase it through frequency. As Erica Hoholick, President of Phenomenon, stated in a press release reported by marketingdive.com on October 17, 2018: "Voting can be fun, and we can prove it to you." That positioning — proof through storytelling rather than assertion — defined the campaign's strategic architecture.
"Jenny's Dead" was directed by Brigg Bloomquist, and "Celebrate Your Way" was directed by Evan Sartory, as documented by clapboard.com and jaygelardi.com. The two directors brought distinct tonal registers to their respective assignments, a choice that gave the two-asset campaign a wider emotional range than a single-film approach would have permitted.
"Jenny's Dead" operates through misdirection. The 90-second film opens in a setting that implies one kind of story — its tone suggests a wake or a moment of communal grief — before pivoting to reveal that the gathering is in fact a voting celebration. The structural move borrows from genre storytelling: establish an expectation, then subvert it at the moment of highest audience engagement. The payoff reframes the entire preceding scene, rewarding attentive viewers and creating a share-worthy moment of comic surprise. This technique is relatively rare in civic advertising, where messaging tends to prioritise clarity over ambiguity, and its use here reflects an understanding that earned media value requires creative risk.
"Celebrate Your Way" functions as the companion piece — brief, direct, and tonally warm. At 15 seconds, it cannot attempt the same structural manoeuvre. Instead it delivers the campaign's affirmative proposition cleanly: voting is a social occasion, and that occasion is worth celebrating. The two films were distributed through social and digital channels, as reported by marketingdive.com, which suited their respective lengths and the platform behaviour of their target audience in the United States. Phenomenon creative director Krish Menon's involvement in shaping the campaign's narrative direction is documented by jaygelardi.com, and the agency's overarching intent was articulated by Hoholick in remarks to marketingdive.com: "Our team has created a campaign that surprises people with a setting and a situation that is unexpected and will spur action and participation." The production's nonpartisan framing was deliberate and consistent across both films, ensuring the work could circulate freely across politically mixed social networks without triggering partisan resistance.
No verified awards for the 2018 Phenomenon and Civic Nation "Celebrate Your Way" campaign appear in the Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby, or WARC databases. Performance data attributable specifically to the two Phenomenon films is not separately isolated in publicly available sources.
At the programme level, the broader #VoteTogether initiative reported a four percent increase in voter participation by September 2018, ahead of the midterm elections themselves, though this figure is not attributed specifically to the Phenomenon films, per jaygelardi.com. One account, cited by jaygelardi.com, states that 1,946 events received #VoteTogether encouragement or assistance in 2018, though this may reflect a broader programme definition than the 500 to 800 voting parties Civic Nation had originally targeted, as reported by marketingdive.com.
Structurally, the campaign's effectiveness rests on several compounding factors. The decision to distribute two films — one built for depth and shareability, one built for reach and brevity — mirrors platform-native thinking about how content moves differently across formats and contexts. The use of narrative surprise in "Jenny's Dead" increases the likelihood of organic sharing, which extends reach beyond paid distribution. The nonpartisan positioning removed a significant friction point for social sharing across politically diverse networks in the United States. These structural choices suggest a campaign engineered for earned amplification, even if the precise scale of that amplification remains undocumented in the public record. The Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100 reflects creative ambition that is clearly present but constrained by the limited asset count and the compressed timeline of a midterm election cycle.
Civic Nation's "Celebrate Your Way" campaign launched in October 2018 in the United States. Created by Phenomenon, it comprised two films — "Jenny's Dead" and "Celebrate Your Way" — designed to reframe voting in the November 6 midterm elections as a shared social occasion through the nonpartisan #VoteTogether initiative.
"Jenny's Dead" was directed by Brigg Bloomquist. The 15-second "Celebrate Your Way" film was directed by Evan Sartory. Both films were produced for Civic Nation by agency Phenomenon and distributed through social and digital channels ahead of the 2018 US midterm elections, as documented by clapboard.com and jaygelardi.com.
Phenomenon's strategic premise was that voting as a social event increases turnout. Civic Nation presented evidence that hosting a voting party could raise participation by six percent, per jaygelardi.com. The campaign used narrative film to make group voting feel aspirational rather than obligatory, targeting US audiences ahead of the November 2018 midterms.
Phenomenon led the creative work for the 2018 Civic Nation campaign. Mekanism handled digital advertising and lead generation, BerlinRosen managed email, social, SMS, and the website, and DKC led public relations efforts, according to prnewswire.com. The campaign targeted US voters ahead of the November 6, 2018 midterm elections.
No verified awards for the Civic Nation "Celebrate Your Way" campaign by Phenomenon appear in the Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby, or WARC databases. The campaign earned a Clapboard Score of 63 out of 100, reflecting creative ambition within a compressed midterm election timeline in the United States.
#VoteTogether began with nine voting celebrations in 2016. It expanded to 57 in 2017, and Civic Nation targeted 500 to 800 voting parties for the 2018 US midterm cycle, per marketingdive.com. One account cited by jaygelardi.com records 1,946 events receiving programme support in 2018, suggesting significant grassroots expansion beyond initial targets.
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