• 
• 
• 

 1 of 3

Gallery

Do online protests really work?

Posted on 17 Sep 2009 at 13:16

It isn't unreasonable to conclude that a casual buyer, unaware of the technology behind the game, would be easily put off by such a tidal wave of negative reviews.

This, combined with the furore of protest erupting elsewhere on the internet, quickly forced EA to relax the game's installation restrictions. But the damage was done, and done very quickly. Spore went on to become the most pirated game of 2008. Nevertheless, EA removed the DRM restrictions from its recent release of The Sims 3.

Show time

With the Spore protest, there was no single figurehead, and instead the campaign relied on a good idea, and individuals making the effort to do something more than add their name to a list. It was similar thinking that, temporarily at least, helped save the television show Jericho in the US.

The programme had built up a loyal core audience, but was still attracting disappointing ratings. By the time its first season had been transmitted, its network broadcaster, CBS, decided to pull the plug on the show. And that, ordinarily, would have been that.

But CBS had reckoned without fans of the show, one of whom was Jonathan Whitesell. Boston-based Whitesell was one of many outraged by the decision to pull the plug and he decided to do something about it. "The [subsequent] campaign came about as a genuine outrage by Jericho fans that a great Americana Show was cancelled and that it ended on a cliffhanger", he told PC Pro.

Thus, within days of the cancellation announcement, fans were creating campaign websites and emailing their protests. Yet it was a piece of lateral thinking that made the difference, and one that spread quickly online.

Taking a quote from the last episode of the show's first season, where one of the characters shouts "nuts!" in response to a request to surrender, it was web broadcaster Shaun Daily who came up with the plan to urge fans online to send bags of nuts to the CBS offices. As simple, and brilliant, as that.

"Over 40 tons of nuts were sent to CBS in protest", recalled Whitesell, "but we did more than send nuts. We literally took down CBS emails, faxes, phone lines. CBS was barraged with fan feedback to the point of shutting its business down. But at the same time it was all done professionally, positively and passionately".

CBS eventually relented and ordered fresh episodes of Jericho, with Nina Tassler, president of CBS Entertainment, writing in a letter to fans: "Your protest was creative, sustained and very thoughtful and respectful in tone. You made a difference". She did, of course, add a PS: "Please stop sending us nuts."

It did, however, prove to be a temporary victory. When a second season of Jericho arrived, the ratings didn't improve and CBS cancelled the show once more. Copycat tactics utilised by fans of other cancelled shows have since proved unsuccessful.

But then simply copying someone else's tactics rarely works. The most effective online campaigns each have at their core an issue that has the ability to capture public interest, but the more lateral the thinking, the greater the odds of simply getting noticed above the crowd.

The Jericho example also, arguably, made television bosses wise to the distorted power of the web. A protest with several thousand people involved can seem much larger than it is when the post room is flooded with confectionary, and the phone lines are jammed. Yet several thousand people, as CBS discovered the hard way, doesn't necessarily equate to several million viewers.