After reviewing the campaign’s social media posts and election results, what creative brief appears to have guided the Mamdani mayoral campaign, and how did the strategy evolve over the course of the campaign?
After reviewing the campaign’s social media posts and election results, what creative brief appears to have guided the Mamdani mayoral campaign, and how did the strategy evolve over the course of the campaign?
In October 2024, Zohran Mamdani, a relative unknown in the New York political landscape, announced his candidacy for mayor of New York City. He won the election with over 50% of the vote and many credit his campaign’s digital strategy as a key component of his success. Instagram served as the primary communication channel where he published more than 650 posts, primarily videos, that addressed substantive topics like housing affordability, immigration, and public transportation. The campaign coupled their online presence with significant offline engagement through door-to-door canvassing by tens of thousands of volunteers.
This case studies the marketing communication strategy of a political campaign and asks students to answer the question :”This campaign will convince [who] that [what].” They are provided a dataset of all 658 posts by the Mamdani campaign that has been analyzed on six dimensions: substantive topic, campaign function, sentiment, tone, delivery form, and a set of surface features including geographic scope. Using the observed communications and outcomes, students reconstruct the creative brief, a short document that defines the strategic purpose of a communication that guided the campaign.
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