In 2017, Volt began as the embodiment of the pan-European sound in a slowly disintegrating Europe. Volt has since been active in more than 30 countries, rapidly growing its membership in each division. Several teams have succeeded in establishing Volt representatives, extending their influence from the European Parliament to local municipalities, proving that European thinking can also be local.
Brief
For the national parliamentary elections, Volt was ambitious, aiming to double its seat count. With only a fraction of the budget of larger parties, Foster&Kin was tasked to develop an unconventional political campaign that would grab media attention and amplify paid activation.
Response
Volt stands for optimism about the future and belief in large-scale systemic change. A vote for Volt is more than a political choice; it demonstrates a future perspective. However, the challenge was how to make the future feel relevant now, when many people feel disconnected from long-term systemic change. This posed the question: how do we pull the future into the now?
Using Futures Thinking, we aimed to bring future perspectives into the present context. The campaign's big idea was 'Imagination activism', a form of activism focused on envisioning a better future rather than just overturning the status quo. By working back from the preferable future, we showed how the political system is like a ‘Rube Goldberg’ action-reaction machine, where every small step has a consequence, and the first step toward systemic change is your vote.
Delivering over 200 deliverables from TV to social media to print, we developed a campaign that played with future and present tenses, aiming to instill urgency in future thinking and embody Volt’s vision in a political climate dominated by short-term, populist thinking. Our main campaign film, inspired by Rube Goldberg machines, visualized a vision for 2050 that leads back to today’s action plan.
As a poster, we embraced Volt’s digital-savvy brand image by simply using a QR code instead of a boring candidate photo and shallow oneliner. For candidate photography, we focused on light-hearted, human portraits, caught in the act, that truly capture the character of the candidates.
Despite challenging election results (despite a landslide win by the extreme populist right), Volt's leader Laurens Dassen praised the campaign as their best to date. We're now expanding our efforts to Volt Europe to develop the campaign for the upcoming European elections.
Output
