How MTV and Paramount are using fandom culture to get out the vote

Stan culture can be rabid, and shows like RuPaul’s Drag Race and Big Brother have stans for days. So why not use it to encourage civic engagement while reaping the brand benefits along the way?

MTV, which has long championed a get-out-the-vote (GOTV) initiative, is once again leaning into social impact campaigns this election cycle, running campaigns across Paramount properties that advocate for closing the community college voting gap, encourage early voting, and recruit poll workers.

In the years since MTV first ran a voting campaign on its airwaves in 1992, its campaign methods have modernized. It has gone from seeking to galvanize its audience mainly via on-air PSAs to reaching potential voters through strategic partnerships with advocacy groups and social influencers and using fandom culture, according to Erika Soto Lamb, VP of social impact strategy for Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios, which houses brands including MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, and Paramount Network.

The efforts are intended to incentivize voting action while bolstering the company’s brand image, too.

“Doing good is good business,” Soto Lamb told Marketing Brew.

A history of getting involved

During the last several election cycles, media and consumer brands like HBO and Nike have urged viewers and customers to head to the polls and vote. MTV, though, isn’t jumping on GOTV campaigns because it’s trendy to do so; it’s been all in on social issue campaigns since its inception, according to Soto Lamb.

“We are a youth culture brand, and on so many fronts, from teen pregnancy to LGBTQ [rights], race, mental health, we know that young people move culture forward, and participating in our democratic process is an important part of that,” Soto Lamb said. “We’ve been calling on young people to use their voice, use their power at the ballot box, for more than 30 years. This is embedded in who we are.”

Why do it for so long? Participating in social impact campaigns “is the right thing to do, and it builds affinity” with its younger audience, Soto Lamb said.

“Whether addressing what was a teen-pregnancy crisis in the ’90s, promoting safe sex and addressing STIs, the campaigns that we run are important to young people and make a difference in their lives,” Soto Lamb said. “The benefits of that are affinity and trust in our brand, and [in] what they’re watching and what they’re essentially buying from us.”

For brands and media properties targeting younger people, choosing to stay out of social issues could have serious consequences. According to a 2024 Edelman report, “58% of Gen Z says that if a brand doesn’t communicate its actions to address societal issues, they assume it is doing nothing or hiding something.”

MTV’s commitment to social impact campaigns has generated plenty of engagement over the years. The company said that its “Vote For Your Life” campaign, which included a website that helped voters check their registration status, create voting plans, and research candidates, racked up 23.3 million views, 1.9 million engagements, and 93 million impressions. Nearly 850,000 people accessed voter support through the campaign, 61% of which were millennials or Gen Z.

From PSAs to IRL experiences

While MTV is responsible for classic PSA-style ads like its “Choose or Lose” campaign that began in 1992, it’s turned to other methods to reach young people in recent election years.

“We know that one, leaning into our fandoms, and two, creating an incentive to be a part of a process is meaningful in driving numbers,” Soto Lamb said.

One way MTV has created an incentive is by partnering with HeadCount, a nonprofit best known for registering people to vote at concerts, to run sweepstakes for a chance to win tickets to some of its popular shows and events, like RuPaul’s Drag Race, The Daily Show, and the VMAs—and encouraging participants to create voting plans, according to Soto Lamb.

Those contests seem to have paid off. In 2022, MTV’sRuPaul’s Drag Race sweepstakes helped 5,142 people check their voter registration status and resulted in 1,318 people registering to vote. Around 56% of the entries for those sweepstakes were from people between the ages of 18 and 34, according to MTV.

Know your crowd

MTV and Paramount are intentional about the issues they highlight within certain programming to help its audience “see themselves and the things that they care about reflected,” Soto Lamb told us. It’s not limited to election years, either; in response to a spate of drag bans in 2023, Ru Paul’s Drag Race partnered with the ACLU to create the Drag Defense Fund, which “aims to educate and activate supporters and push back against restrictive anti-LGBTQ legislation.” In June, Variety reported that, in its first 14 months, the fund had “helped defend and defeat multiple drag-ban laws, ordinances, and more.”

“We know there are issues that are important to the RuPaul’s Drag Race fandom, for example, and we know that we can give that audience on ramp to take action,” Soto Lamb said. “We had a very successful campaign in response to drag bans that made perfect sense for the RuPaul’s Drag Race show to invite their audience to speak out and play a part in response to drag bans.”

The brand also tries to deploy its social impact calls to action in a way that’s mindful of both the brand and its audience, Soto Lamb said.

“We find the right ask for the right audience and bring our viewers into creating the change that we know they want to see in the world,” Soto Lamb said.

In some cases, that means knowing which audiences probably don’t need to be targeted with GOTV messaging. Soto Lamb said that the company recognizes that targeting viewers of Comedy Central’s The Daily Show with a register-to-vote message could be a wasted ask, since fans of a political show are likely to already be registered. Instead, she said, Daily Show viewers were a better target for the campaign “Power the Polls,” which calls for viewers to sign up to be poll workers.