How MTV Activates Gen-Z to Vote

The Civic Alliance is committed to a thriving democracy. Our more than 1,300 members, employing more than 5.8 million people in the United States, have plenty of experience on how best to engage in civic life.

Our recent Civic Summer School series aimed to capitalize on that knowledge and share lessons learned from civic engagement conducted by a diverse community of business leaders.

Our Civic Summer School teacher is Erika Soto Lamb , Vice President of Social Impact Strategy at MTV/Paramount, who chatted with Steven Levine from the Civic Alliance, about the way the entertainment company has engaged its employees, partners, and viewers in high-impact civic participation.

Why does MTV/Paramount prioritize nonpartisan civic engagement?

I always say that doing this work, I stand on the shoulders of giants  MTV is a brand that has been working to engage people on civics, specifically young people, people of color, and the LGBTQ+ community to vote and participate in our democracy for the last 30 plus years. Since our original partnership with Rock the Vote, we have led iconic campaigns that mobilize young people to vote like Choose or Lose, +1 The Vote, and Vote Early. There is a real legacy of this work in our company and with each new election we innovate and figure out the right new partnerships to leverage MTV's influential platform to engage young people to vote.  We do all of this because it strengthens our bond with the audience and because it’s an integral part of our brand’s purpose and mission.

Knowing that MTV’s audience is mainly made up of Gen-Z and younger generations, how do you best engage these audiences to play an active role in democracy?

We develop our campaigns to meet our audience where they are — and MTV centers young people in everything we do. 

With that in mind, we partner with organizations that work with young people, as well as individual youth activists focused on the civic engagement space, to ensure that our campaigns are informed and advised by the audience we are trying to reach. For each campaign, we put together youth advisory boards to advise and  influence the messaging and creative we use to motivate people to vote.

Our approach has always been: make voting fun and accessible for all. One particular activation that I love is MTV’s partnership with the youth focused non-profit HeadCount. We worked to bring young, BIPOC voters back to the polls for the midterms by hosting a sweepstakes campaign and elevating one of MTV’s most enthusiastic fandoms, RuPaul’s Drag Race, in a civic engagement contest. We leveraged existing communication channels and trusted voices to reach young people that may not be involved in politics, and provided them with a clear path to participation by encouraging the RuPaul’s Drag Race fandom to check their voter registration status by incentivizing action with a curated fan experience that motivated them to participate in the democratic process. Any participant who was not registered to vote was then seamlessly pointed to an online voter registration form. All participants then received multiple reminders to vote via text and email, addressing them directly as fans of RuPaul’s Drag Race. We were able to encourage more than 5K people to check their voter registration status and registered more than 1K people to vote.

Can you share more about your early voting campaign?

In 2020, youth voter turnout was at a record high — this was something MTV wanted to continue to build momentum for in the 2022 election. So, last year we announced our “Voting Early is Easier” campaign with the goal to make voting more accessible for the millions of students without voting options on campuses across the country. MTV collaborated with Duke University to conduct research and we found that 74% of colleges had no polling sites in 2020 and 90% didn’t have in-person early voting options on campus. While college students voted at a higher rate than youth voters overall in 2020, ease of access to voting sites – including transportation and inconvenient locations – were consistent barriers cited by young people who did not vote. So we partnered with Campus Vote Project, local civic engagement groups, and college student partners to host a campus challenge to empower students to bring new early voting options to campuses, focusing primarily on community colleges, Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) and large public universities.

How have you successfully received internal buy-in to execute these high-impact and successful campaigns?

Making sure decision makers recognize the power of civic engagement is vital. There are key selling points that civic engagement helps make the business case for: it deepens relationships with employees, helps build brand perception with consumers, and garners community involvement. These three different audiences — employees, customers, and the community — which every company and organization has, no matter where you’re coming from or what you do, are really central to the business model. So when we pitch our social impact campaigns, we make the case that our plan will  achieve measurable success with at least one of those key audiences. 

What advice does MTV/Paramount have for companies starting their civic engagement journey?

It’s important to recognize that you’re not in a vacuum and there is always an opportunity to learn from others — civic engagement isn’t a space you have to navigate alone. Every MTV campaign begins with a landscaping and learning period where we reach out to organizations already doing this work. The Civic Alliance is a great outlet for figuring out who to partner with on ideas. I would also recommend conducting a 360 review of what work is being done, what your company’s capacity is, and what your interests and mission/values are to understand what value you can bring to your audience.

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