Making government to do the right [$2.5B] thing.

Iowa had gone twenty-five years without raising its gas tax. One in five bridges in the state was officially rated structurally deficient. Five blue-ribbon panels had recommended raising the tax, and five times the recommendation died, because the Governor and the congressional majority had built campaigns on never raising taxes.

So I built a campaign with the capacity to change their promised behavior. Public bridge data plus the state's billboard inventory enabled a powerful mockup: a cracked bridge support stamped "structurally deficient bridge," placeable beside the real deficient bridges in each holdout's district. We showed it to leadership holdouts privately, as a courtesy, along with the list of unsafe bridges their constituents drove every day. Party leaders called my client asking that the signs never appear near their members' districts. The aggressive version never needed to run. A softer campaign ran in a handful of holdout districts and the capitol, and still made front-page news.

Result

Three months later, the same no-new-taxes legislature and fiscally conservative governor raised the gas tax 50 percent, driving more than $2.5 billion in new road and bridge funding in the years since. The measure was never awareness; it was whether a holdout who saw the mock-up would move before it ever ran. Party leaders calling to keep the signs away from their districts was the moment we knew.

My method here was based on early thinking that eventually was folded into Loadmap. Simplified, it’s this: stand inside the resistant person's world until you can understand what would actually move them, then put that specific thing in a place they can’t ignore it.

Scope: Campaign concept art & copy, full project creative direction, photo manipulation, out of home, website, PR support: Tate Linden. Lindsay B. Garrett designed the layout used in the final campaign.

Production art: