Gerrymandering occurs when politicians redraw voting district lines to give themselves an unfair advantage in elections. It enables politicians to pick their voters from behind closed doors instead of voters picking their politicians. Gerrymandering affects 70% of the United States – nearly 188 million people – and the district maps drawn in 2021 will be in effect for 10 years.

On September 27, 2021, Texas announced its new congressional district map, which added a new 37th district that included much of the city of Austin. Legislators used gerrymandering to diminish the voting power of minorities. Non-profit, anti-corruption organization RepresentUS needed to create a campaign that would make more Americans aware of the corruption of gerrymandering before the maps were confirmed. Gerrymandering is a complicated political issue, so we needed to explain the problem in simple terms to encourage people to join our protest.

Just three weeks after Texas’s district maps were unveiled, we opened the doors of Gerry’s Partisan Pizza, a corrupt pizza shop that served and delivered free pizza only within the bounds of the gerrymandered 37th voting district. We exposed the corruption of gerrymandering by handpicking our customers in the same way as politicians were handpicking their voters. Anyone who didn’t live within the district was gerrymandered out of free pizza and given information on gerrymandering. We opened a brick-and-mortar shop and delivered, using pizza as a metaphor for the corruption of politicians.

We then went on a two-week food-truck tour, giving out pizzas to residents of gerrymandered districts across the United States, from Texas to Wisconsin. Once again, we handpicked our customers in the same way as politicians handpick their voters when they gerrymander. Our pizza truck delivered free pizzas and lessons on gerrymandering.

We took the voting district maps in Texas and five other American states and created a database of addresses that were in each district. We did this for each district that we wanted to target, including Texas’s 37th voting district and districts in North Carolina, Maryland, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. When someone entered their address into the website, it determined in which district they lived and thus whether they lived in one of Gerry’s delivery zones.

Using addresses allowed us to precisely target the people who were living in gerrymandered districts.

We opened a brick-and-mortar Gerry’s Partisan Pizza shop in downtown Austin, Texas, within the bounds of the 37th voting district. Signage around the shop educated passerby and those who entered the shop. During opening weekend, we ran a local TV and YouTube

Commercial, which resulted in more foot traffic to the activation.

The pizza shop was a form of OOH with which passersby could actively engage by stopping to talk with brand ambassadors about the issue and taking flyers to learn more about it. Over the course of the weekend, we ran out of our supply of pizzas, having filled the shop with Texans eager to learn more about gerrymandering.

After that weekend, we took Gerry’s food truck on the road to five other states, serving slices in gerrymandered districts and earning features on nightly broadcast news in every state in which we stopped.

From Texas to Wisconsin, we covered more than 5,000 miles (8,046 km) of gerrymandered land and served more than 6,000 pizza slices.

Gerry’s was hugely popular in the press, resulting in more than 360MM earned media impressions and a reach of more than 2.18MM. Gerry’s was featured on broadcast news in every city the pizza truck stopped and was featured everywhere online, from pop culture publications like Eater to CBS news.

Governors and mayors from multiple states came out to Gerry’s Partisan Pizza and spoke on broadcast news about the activation. Of the individuals who engaged with Gerry’s Partisan Pizza, 35% called their lawmakers via our CTA phone number and demanded change. After our activation, the US Department of Justice for the Biden administration sued the state of Texas, alleging that the gerrymandered or redrawn map infringed the voting rights of minority voters.