Tinsel’s Erica Taylor Haskins on using her experiential superpowers for good

Ad Age is marking Black History Month 2025 with our fifth-annual Honoring Creative Excellence package. (Read the introduction and all the essays here.) Today, guest editor Damaune Journey turns the spotlight to Erica Taylor Haskins, co-founder and chief relationship officer of Tinsel Experiential Design, who writes about her company’s work on a national food truck program in support of voters. Through our 15 years in business, Tinsel Experiential Design has established a reputation for producing high-impact events and immersive experiences for brands including Spotify, Sony Music Entertainment, Uber and Condé Nast. In February 2020, we celebrated our 10th business anniversary at the New York Public Library (we got a special dispensation to offer live tattoos on the marble mezzanine). Months later, at the height of the pandemic, we had the chance to use our experiential superpowers for good, creating a very different type of audience experience. Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, we were tapped by partners at Impactual and Pizza to the Polls to execute a national food truck program designed to feed, caffeinate, hydrate and energize people waiting in line to vote. While this social impact program was very intentionally designed as a nonpartisan push for democracy (“little d”), the campaign was unsurprisingly most powerful in communities that have historically been disenfranchised by voter-suppression efforts. And, of course, so many of those communities are home to Black and brown voters. The Pizza to the Polls food truck program was inspired in part by First Lady Michelle Obama’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which she told voters to “pack a brown bag dinner and maybe breakfast too, because we’ve got to be willing to stand in line all night if we have to.” That scenario played out, as expected, in so many locations across the country. Poll worker shortages, limited polling sites and social distancing measures caused many in-person voting locations to see even longer wait times than usual. Notably, some early voters in Georgia waited up to eight hours to cast ballots; in Texas, people stood in lines that snaked through parking lots and around voting locations for over three hours; and in Ohio, some lines stretched for a quarter of a mile. In response, the Pizza to the Polls food truck program scaled to 29 cities across the country, with 289 trucks rolling over a 9-day period. Our nationwide teams served over 1 million voters, with a 250% increase in social impressions and press coverage by CNN, Time, the Washington Post and The Hill. The program was also amplified and championed online by celebrity supporters including Oprah, Kerry Washington, Ava DuVernay, Questlove and Lil Jon. Fueled by the success of this inaugural program, Tinsel has continued to partner with Pizza to the Polls for local election cycles and voter registration drives nationwide, including at select college campuses. In 2021, we rolled trucks for the Georgia special election that won Reverend Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff their U.S. Senate seats—and with them, the Senate majority. After Georgia voters turned out in record numbers for these races, state legislators passed S.B. 202, a sweeping, racially discriminatory omnibus law that pointedly disenfranchised voters—particularly voters of color. Among other provisions, the intent was to ban Georgians from providing food and water to voters waiting in lines more than 150 feet from the polls. Before portions of the law were struck down, we joked that we might have to add a contingency line for bail money moving forward. With full sincerity, I will be forever proud that Pizza to the Polls has entrusted our Tinsel team with such a historic, high-impact program that continues to serve and support the democratic (“little d”) process. Two things can be true: Our team has so much heart for this work to date, but we also wish there weren’t an urgent need for the program to exist. The campaign continues to feel timely and topical. It’s been a wild ride to so unexpectedly find ourselves standing on the shoulders of giants, including Georgia’s own Representative John Lewis—leveraging our team’s experiential expertise, tight ROS and comms plans, audience engagement strategies and robust contingency planning (including COVID-19 safety and electioneering law protocols) to make a little good trouble. Sign up for Ad Age newsletters From influencer marketing to agencies, get the latest news and analysis delivered to your inbox Click here

Tinsel’s Erica Taylor Haskins on using her experiential superpowers for good

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