Senior Citizens Mock Non-Voting 'Young People' in New Spots from Nail

Nail Communications has teamed up with progressive organisation ACRONYM to develop and launch spots starring condescending older people with the goal of spurring young US voters to register to vote and show up to the polls on Election Day. 

According to Alec Beckett, creative director at Nail, “Every election we tell young people to vote and they don’t vote. What if we told them not to vote and ‘we’ were the people who vote regularly and have put this country on its current path? The millennial population and the senior population are about the same size. However, only 46% of people 18-34 years old voted in the last election, while 72% of the “Silent Generation” (71+ years old) voted. This discrepancy in turnout is the simple reason that Trump is president, health care is not universal, mentally ill people can buy guns and a thousand other issues - big and small - that are not the way America’s youth would like them to be.”

ACRONYM is funding a six-figure media budget through digital platforms nationwide during the run up to the election. The ads will run on Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Stories, Snapchat, YouTube and Hulu. 

Working with a talented, all-volunteer production team, donated gear and a donated studio space (thanks to Brooklyn Fire Proof, Hand Held Films and Final Frame), Nail filmed senior citizens reminding young people that they and their elderly buddies are the reason for almost everything that’s wrong with the world. (And there’s nothing they can do about it. Except vote.)  

The spots were launched as part of ACRONYM’s Knock the Vote campaign, a multi-million-dollar program designed to get more people registered to vote and to the polls using nontraditional creative and first-of-its-kind tools online. ACRONYM is a political organisation committed to winning elections and building sustainable digital infrastructure for the progressive movement—and one of the most impactful ways to do that is to turn more non-voters into voters with boundary-pushing creative campaigns. The Knock the Vote campaign also includes a new tool to enable voters to check their friends’ voter registration statuses online, without downloading an app.

Tara McGowan, founder and CEO of ACRONYM added:  “Unfortunately there are still too many reasons why so many Americans don’t get to the polls on Election Day, not least of which is how difficult some states, mainly those run by Republican majorities, have made it for people to exercise their democratic right to vote. 

ACRONYM is doing everything it can to counter those efforts by providing more voters with the information and tools they need to register to vote and show up to the polls on Election Day—particularly with nontraditional creative campaigns that speak to people who have been less likely to vote in previous midterm elections. 

We also know how fed up so many Americans are with the state of our politics today, and Knock the Vote gives them an opportunity to channel their frustrations into civic action and multiply their vote by getting their own communities mobilized alongside them.”