Democracy on the
Ballot, in Spanish

01The Opportunity

Nine questions will be on the Massachusetts ballot on November 3, the most since 1994. Three of them are yours, and they are among the most procedural on the page. Long ballots produce drop-off, where a voter marks the top and leaves the bottom blank. That risk is highest among voters who receive the least explanation, and Spanish-dominant voters in Massachusetts receive close to none.

The audience is large enough for that to matter.

The exposure is also concentrated. Latino voters in Massachusetts cluster in Greater Boston and in the Gateway Cities, where the Latino share of the population runs from roughly 46% in Lynn to 83% in Lawrence, and where turnout has historically been the lowest in the state. Those are the places where Questions 1, 3 and 4 are most likely to go unmarked, and where almost nobody is explaining them in Spanish.

02What We Heard

You told us where the friction is. Across community presentations, in English and in Spanish, the hardest part is never the policy argument. It is explaining what a ballot question is, how it works, and what changes from today to the day after it passes.

That is the job we do most often. Our work for Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and for Montgomery County both existed to explain something the audience had never been taught, in Spanish, and in both cases video carried the explanation while every other format supported it. In a national advocacy campaign built the same way, video accounted for 93.59% of all the engagement the campaign produced.

The campaign has two jobs:

• Explain. What Questions 1, 3 and 4 do, and what changes if they pass. One idea across all three, the way Democracy on the Ballot already frames them.
• Stay credible. Everything is written as civic information and labeled as paid content. El Planeta's standing with this audience is what we are bringing, and it only holds if it is used carefully.

03The Creative

We propose two original short-form videos in Spanish, each answering the two questions a voter actually has: what is on the ballot, and what changes if it passes. Scripted with your team and produced by El Planeta with crew, multi-camera shoot and post-production, delivered captioned. Four carousels, an explainer article and two newsletter placements carry the same explanation into the places where video is not the right unit.

Everything is written in Spanish from the first draft rather than translated, so the explanation is built around how this audience already talks about voting. Your messaging sets what the content says, and our knowledge of the community shapes how it says it.

04Distribution, Targeting and Testing

Where it runs

Across El Planeta's Massachusetts channels: El Planeta Daily, our weekday newsletter, elplaneta.com, our Instagram and Facebook accounts, and the monthly print edition distributed across Greater Boston. Paid budget then goes behind the videos and carousels on Meta, which is what carries the content past our own readers and into the wider Latino audience across the state.

How we target

Latino audiences in Massachusetts by city and community, weighted toward Greater Boston and the Gateway Cities, built from El Planeta's own first-party audience data. That data is what tells us who reads in Spanish and what they follow, so the weight goes toward people already reading news and civic information, who are the readers most likely to be holding a ballot in November.

Ballot-question advertising runs inside Meta's Special Ad Category, where lookalike audiences and voter-file matching are unavailable to every advertiser. That places the weight on first-party audience, which is what El Planeta contributes: a Latino readership in Massachusetts we reach directly, together with the Spanish-language and geographic signals the category permits.

How we test and optimize

All six pieces go into market together at launch, the two videos and the four carousels. We watch which of them earn attention and in which cities, optimize toward engagement, concentrate spend behind the ones that are working, and walk your team through what we are seeing while we see it, so the calls get made together.

06Timeline

Every week of delay in signing comes out of the flight rather than out of production, because production has a floor.

07Investment