Eric Kohn, “‘Moonlight’ and ‘Boyhood’ Inspired Joe Biden’s Video Team as They Scored 1.6 Billion Views.” IndieWire, Nov 11, 2020.
On November 7, when media outlets announced Joe Biden as the next President of the United States, his video team was ready to pounce. At 11:52 a.m., less than 15 minutes after the last cable network made its call, Biden’s social channels unleashed a nearly two-minute montage of Ray Charles singing “America the Beautiful,” with poetic images of diverse Americans across the country, many of whom grasped golden picture frames. That motif was an extension of work by visual artist Lorraine O’Grady, who endorsed the project well ahead of Election Day.
“We finished it one week before the election and we had decided to position it as a video that we’d run after we won,” said Andrew Gauthier, the video director for the Biden
campaign, “understanding that there was a chance we wouldn’t be able to run it.”
It was worth the risk. The video, which has garnered over 68 million views across platforms, marked the culmination of a breathless digital strategy that evolved under an intense and bruising campaign season. Marred by the practical challenges of the pandemic and the divisive rhetoric of the competition, the election presented daunting challenges to even the most seasoned campaign vets. By its end, however, the Biden campaign told IndieWire that it racked up over 1.6 billion views for original videos posted to its social platforms since the start of the year. (…)