South Dakota lawmakers question effectiveness of Freedom Works Here ad campaign

Lawmakers questioned the Governor's Office of Economic Development over the effectiveness of the state's Freedom Works Here workforce ad campaign on Monday in Pierre.

In an interim meeting of the Appropriations committee, GOED Commissioner Chris Schilken and GOED Finance Director Travis Dovre defended the campaign, which has run since late June, saying that while it's one of the most successful workforce campaigns in state history, tracking the success has been difficult.

"We would like to be able to provide a list of every individual who moved here, but the challenge with past workforce marketing initiatives have been just that," Dovre said. "Not everybody who sees those ads decides to register with the Department of Labor and Regulation for job seeking services. They may use other sources or just decide to move here for other reasons. So, unfortunately, the short answer is we will probably never be able to have an exact number to provide to this committee of how many people have moved here."

The office has tracked the campaign's success based off of how many impressions the ads have gotten on television and social media, as well as tracking who's registering to learn more about moving to South Dakota, Schilken explained.

He defined the workforce campaign's success as having gained over 800 million impressions across the country, with 7,423 people having requested information on South Dakota and over 1,900 people proceeding to the final stages of finding a career in the state.

In Gov. Kristi Noem's weekly columns last week, she highlighted four stories of people who had moved to the Mount Rushmore state after seeing the ads.

"Our Freedom Works Here campaign is showing people that South Dakota really is the best state in America to live, work, and raise a family – and folks are moving here to be a part of it all," the second-term Republican governor wrote.

Additionally, the stunt the office pulled by sponsoring a NASCAR entry, driven by a last-in-the-points standing driver at two different races, resulted in a 0.24% click-through rate, Schilken said.

More: Kristi Noem's South Dakota workforce campaign is hitting the NASCAR Cup Series circuit

The total cost of the NASCAR sponsorship was $130,000.

Rep. Chris Karr, R-Sioux Falls, questioned why GOED and Strategic Media Placement, the Ohio-based marketing firm selected to oversee the Freedom Works Here campaign, didn't come up with a better way to track the success.

"You hire all these national companies that have all this experience and I imagine one of them might have an idea, too, about how do we track this back and what incentive can we provide so that they are encouraged to identify whether they moved or not at the end of the day," Karr said.

Aside from the difficulty of tracking who's moving to South Dakota and who's actually applying for open jobs in a state with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation — state metrics say South Dakota is No. 1 in this category, while Economic Policy Institute's third-quarter state unemployment data shows South Dakota is tied for third — lawmakers were also curious about the funding of the campaign.

More: South Dakota governor’s economic advisers caution against optimism in 2024

Initially, the state allocated $5 million in future funds to GOED for the Freedom Works Here campaign, which started in mid-June. But GOED received an additional $400,000 from the over 30 private businesses who wanted to partner with the department in order to receive information about the campaign.

Schilken told lawmakers GOED had partnered with private businesses before for marketing opportunities and that GOED matched the expenditures the private businesses made.

"The more dollars that the partners provided, GOED matched, the longer the ad could run," he said.

The funds raised from the private businesses are being placed into the Industrial Development Fund, Schilken said.

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated marketing firm Design Sensory had overseen the Freedom Works Here campaign. Strategic Media Placement won the RFP for the Freedom Works Here campaign.

This article originally appeared on Sioux Falls Argus Leader: Freedom works here ad campaign tracking success has been hit or miss