We were looking for an engaging way to tell the story of the 2020 presidential election on Instagram. We also wanted to showcase all the excellent social-media story telling that our campaign embed reporters are were doing across the country, so @OnTheRoad2020 was born!
@OnTheRoad2020 uses Instagram stories to tell the story of the 2020 campaign trail from the perspective of CNN’s embed producers – millennial journalists who travel around the country with presidential campaigns.
The embeds have very full schedules, following around major candidates from event to event, recording it for CNN and taking extensive notes. The CNN Social team launches embeds on different Instagram Story assignments, asking them to capture and feed in photos and footage of their days. The embeds shoot everything on their phones, from selfie-style set-up and explainers, to walk and talks, tours, b-roll shots, and even interviews with the candidates and staff themselves.
The result has been a very creative, fun way of capturing the sights and the sounds of the campaign trail. The account grew from 0 to over 10K followers in just a few months. Our audience is mostly under the age of 35 and very engaged in politics. The Instagram account has also been the inspiration of a CNN.com video series of the same name (you can view the videos in the IGTV section of the account, or see one here: https://cnn.it/2P9Us6t)
