The Voting Playbook by Yahoo Sports
By: Christopher Clarke
Tags: Collaboration, Voting, Design, Sports, Diversity

Due to the pandemic, more people considered voting by mail. Questions arose about how to register and vote by mail per state, and how to track a ballot after it had been dropped in the post. People had voiced concern about whether or not the U.S. Postal Service could be trusted to service the election, as well as uncertainty about what information could actually be believed.

When asked how Yahoo Sports responded, producer for Yahoo Sports social Kyndall Freer explains, “What happened was we didn’t have sports, so we had to figure out how to pivot. I was watching all of the Black Lives Matter protests, all of the athletes getting involved, and I felt like I wanted to be more involved and do something more. So I reached out to Jackie Pepper, who I knew was very involved in grassroots in voter registration in the LA area. And I asked if she wanted to take on this massive project with me.”

With so many urgent issues 2020 needed to see an increase in participation over 2016. So Yahoo enlisted celebrities to use their platform and drive folks to the polls. Put simply, the Voting Playbook sought to funnel folks fandom from stadiums to ballot boxes.

Sourcing talent for this production required a considered approach. The team’s intention remained clear.

When asked what she hopes to achieve, Yahoo Sports Producer Jackie Pepper responds, “The most important part about getting talent attached to the Voting Playbook was to make sure this was something they were really passionate about.”

Equally important was equal access and representation.

Pepper continues, “Being inclusive of everybody, that’s part of voting and part of democracy. So we really cared that we had equal representation. We wanted to reflect the population of the United States within our video hosts.”

And they represented, indeed. The majority of talent involved posted the social toolkits to their personal social media accounts multiple times and engaged with Yahoo accounts’ posts of Voting Playbook.

It wasn’t just a one and done with them, the majority of the participants were actively involved with it pretty much up until Nov. 3.

Yahoo Sports product manager Tosin Adeniji adds, “What was super important for me was just to make sure that it was accessible for all. We have various different types of users that come to Yahoo Sports. And we just wanted to make sure with Amber and Mika and some others in the team that worked on this, that it was accessible.”

Sports and politics are inextricably connected. Yet some fans are divided on athletes’ roles. Given the overall goal of getting out the vote some may question the approach through the lens of sport.

“It’s really important that the conversation that was being reflected on the court, on the field, in the boardrooms was also reflected in our product.” says Adeniji. “We take a lens of not just showcasing scores and utility, but also like the whole context of sports.”

“Sport is a microcosm of society,” declares Jackie Pepper. “There are some people in our society who say shut up and dribble, who think that athletes should just be one-dimensional human beings and that we should just use them for our own entertainment, but athletes, they have always been trendsetters. We wanted to use the platform that they have, the voice that they have on their own social media platforms, and give them an extra boost, give them an extra place to spread the good word about voting. And based on some of the numbers that we’ve seen coming back from Voting Playbook, we see a lot of engagement.”

It’s clear the voting playbook filled an important role.

When asked how the Voting Playbook delivered on Yahoo’s promise to amplify what matters most to people, Sr. Product Marketing Manager Marcus Taylor says, “There’s been a lot of uncertainty around this election in terms of how do I vote, where do I go vote, will my vote count. Like there’s so much misinformation out there. There is a need and a hunger for information to come from credible sources, like the Yahoo brand.”

Taylor clarifies, “Didn’t matter who you planned on voting for. That part was irrelevant. Just making sure that your vote counted was the main purpose of the Voting Playbook.”

So how did the team approach marketing this whole project?

Creative Director Jeff White explains the creative strategy and messaging this way, “When we jumped in and started doing creative around it, the most important thing was to keep it in the sports vernacular and keep that humanness to it, that athletes are just like your friends or neighbors.”

White goes on, “They’re not the talking heads of the political role. They speak in the language that you speak down on the street or in the corner with your friends. Overall, I’d say the creative strategy is that we kept it human and we kept it sports and fun.”

Marcus Taylor adds, “I think what we were hoping to communicate is that same sense of responsibility that you have to cheer for your team. We were hoping that that would carry over and you would feel that same sense of responsibility to kind of cheer for the country.”

Inspired. The Yahoo brand did a very Yahoo thing in a very Yahoo way.

Antony Ndiege, Yahoo Brand Manager sums up his feelings, “One of the things that was very exciting is that this project was able to highlight the values of this brand that makes Yahoo very unique to our customers.”

“In this case, we were able to meet cultural moment by being upfront about what we care about and what our customers have shown us that they care about.” affirms Ndiege. “And this leads into all our values of providing access. And we also continue to build trust by providing clear and credible information that our customers can look and be able to use in order to guide their decisions.”

Yahoo definitely showed up as a leader on this crucial cultural issue.

Strategy director Jeff Clift agrees, “As we look at the landscape today, brands that lead are ahead of culture, they don’t follow culture. I think this is a great case where we took our fandom of our sports fans and our understanding from our newsgroups and voting and brought those together to create something very meaningful and relevant.”

“And it just felt natural to Yahoo.” remarks Clift. “It wasn’t something that they forced and manufactured. And I think that’s the key. When the strategy can live in that context where the products and content and culture are all supporting a bigger idea, that leads to something greater.”