When millennials and Gen Z hit the polls this election, they’ll be voting for their lives. That’s the message at the center of the Vote For Your Life PSAs created by ViacomCBS’ Entertainment & Youth Givision. Or, for those who tune into Comedy Central, there’s a more light-hearted suggestion: Vote Naked.

Whether it’s nude or clothed, getting audiences to vote is the goal for ViacomCBS’ youth and entertainment brands—which include MTV, Comedy Central, VH1, and CMT. Brianna Cayo Cotter, SVP for social impact for ViacomCBS’ Entertainment & Youth Group, and her team have been brainstorming ways to get young people and people of color to both register and cast their vote since this time last year. Over the past few months, due to COVID-19 and the killings of Black Americans by police, the messaging only became more urgent, she explains.

“In past years, the Vote For Your Life message would feel maybe too hyperbolic,” Cotter says. “However, with COVID-19, the state of the world, and the state of our democracy, Vote For Your Life really feels like an authentic level of urgency.”

The Vote For Your Life campaign was created in partnership with the Ad Council, following the success of the #AloneTogether initiative the organizations launched in the wake of COVID-19 earlier this year. The Group also worked with Color of Change on a number of PSAs that addressed the Black Lives Matter movement and racial justice.

Cayo Cotter spoke to the ViacomCBS Newsroom about how the ViacomCBS Entertainment & Youth Group established a national holiday with Vote Early Day and how they registered thousands of poll workers across the country. She also shared her hopes as the election rapidly approaches.

Nicole Bitette: How did the Entertainment & Youth Group land on #VoteForYourLife and #VoteNaked as two campaigns to come from the brands?

Brianna Cayo Cotter: In any campaign, we want to make sure that we're speaking authentically to our audience. We wanted Vote For Your Life to resonate not only with our brands but also across ViacomCBS and the wider industry at large, to achieve the level of reach we needed to get enough people to register.

We did a lot of testing to understand what message our audience would respond to—specifically looking at reaching young voters and young voters of color, and we wanted to find a message that would inspire them to register and turn out to vote. Vote For Your Life was the hands-down winner on that.

For Comedy Central, with Vote Naked we wanted to balance the urgency of the Vote For Your Life message with a comedic point of view. The Comedy Central audience responds very well to thirst trap videos and the response to this series that they've created has been massive.

It's been really interesting and fun to see how these campaigns adapt across different brands, but at their core, they have a singular and united message which is check your registration, make a plan to vote early, and vote.

You can vote naked, but your ballot shouldn’t be. Read the rules and go to https://t.co/eowv4dDOz2 for more info. @representus pic.twitter.com/jOkQsPe8VB

— comedycentral (@ComedyCentral) October 7, 2020

NB: Why is it important for brands like MTV and Comedy Central to promote voting?

BCC: The United States spends more money than almost any other democratic country on our elections, but almost all of those billions of dollars get spent in very partisan ways. It’s money that is spent primarily by the parties in the campaigns to turn out proven voters. Older, whiter voters. They are ignoring the people who have not voted before or have not voted consistently. Brands and companies have a significant role in running the largest non-partisan voter turnout and engagement campaigns, and we do it in a way that we know will resonate with our audience. The opportunity is to actually get these messages in front of people that realistically will not hear about what their voter registration deadlines are, or what their early voting options are, if they don't hear it from us.

NB: The Entertainment & Youth Group is behind Vote Early Day, which took place on Oct. 24. How did that initiative develop, and how did it evolve due to COVID-19?

BCC: We launched Vote Early Day in early March right before everything started to shut down. We knew that it was essential for people to know more about their early voting options. Then COVID-19 hit, and it didn’t just become important: It became absolutely critical for people navigating the rapidly changing voting options in the middle of a global pandemic.

We went from a good idea that would have been a really awesome holiday to something enormous in its first inaugural year that is going to be a long-held voting tradition. I truly believe so. We have over 2,700 partners now, and there are record numbers of people voting early.

More than three million people cast a ballot on Vote Early Day and the initiative motivated more than 75 million people in total to cast early ballots. On Twitter, #VoteEarlyDay trended for 10 hours—peaking at No. 1.

NB: Beyond finding ways to get people to vote, what other initiatives did your group spearhead to benefit the election process?

BCC: Power The Polls is another initiative we were a founding partner of to help recruit the next generation of poll workers due to a significant shortage of poll workers, most of whom were over 65 and at very high risk of contracting COVID-19.

We launched this endeavor for five weeks straight in July, and Trevor Noah mentioned it at the end of The Daily Show to push people to it. We had our talent promoting it across platforms. And now, there are 700,000 new poll workers recruited to work the polls. In many counties that were facing a real crisis, we have heard they now have too many volunteers and don’t know what to do with them all, which is such a great problem to have.

NB: What are you hopeful for in this election and the months that follow?

BCC: I very much hope that we see historic voter turnout in this election. I think all signs right now point to that being the case. Whatever barriers are put up in these final days that make it harder for young people and people of color to vote, I sincerely hope that people persevere and make sure that their votes are cast. This has been a very unusual year and an unprecedented election. It’s very likely that we will not have election results on election night, so my hope is that the country stays committed and calm, and that every vote is counted in the days after the election, so we have confidence that we have had a fair election.