2024 Winner

Colorado Division of Motor Vehicles

Historic Colorado Contest

Launched in late 2022, the wildly successful Historic Colorado Contest asked Coloradans to help honor the Centennial State’s 150th anniversary and history by participating in a license plate design contest that included a public vote to choose the winning designs. The long-term campaign garnered impressive numbers: over 35,000 votes and 312 submissions from 216 entrants in two contest divisions. This ultimately resulted in the U13 winning design becoming the fastest-selling specialty license plate in Colorado history, selling 5,700 license plates in its first two months of availability (August and September 2023). The 13+ winning design also had strong sales numbers, moving almost 3,000 plates in the same period. However, turning this campaign into a success was difficult with the team experiencing setbacks, such as a low number of initial entries as well as a DMV website outage during 5 of the first 7 days in the contest’s 2-week voting period. With flexibility and determination, the DMV successfully pivoted many times, changing tactics and engaging media outlets multiple times over 12 months. During the contest, the communications team produced: 20 press releases, 42 photos, 6 videos, 4 interviews, 97 graphics, 2 B-roll packages, 1 TV show segment, 1 press conference at the Governor’s Office, and 1 elementary school student engagement. This sustained effort resulted in 96 instances of earned media and 72 instances of media kit collateral use (graphics, photos and videos). For the first time, the DMV worked with a social media influencer, Ethan the License Plate Guy, and found great success reaching millions of Coloradans that traditional news outlets were not. The collaboration garnered: over 8 million total video views, 2,602 total comments, and 1,307,858 total likes. The campaign culminated with a public reveal on March 1, 2023 with Colorado Gov. Jared Polis announcing the winners during a press conference at the Governor’s Office. The campaign’s performance is even more impressive considering the less than $3,000 spent on the effort ($2,000 in prizes, $250 for social media influencer collaboration and about $600 spent on social media ads).