Advocacy Lessons from Spiderman

The spider web and the Internet web have just gone toe-to-toe in a strength competition and the Internet wins. Here is the blow by blow of the fight.

Background:
In one corner, the Yankees, Red Sox, Sony, Columbia Pictures, Major League Baseball and $2.5 million dollars in revenues. In the other corner, the Internet, a guy with an online petition, an ESPN Internet poll, and 45,000+ pissed off fans.

Round 1. May 5, 2004 The big powers of MLB, Sony and the owners of the teams throw a surprise punch. Columbia Pictures announce that the bases in all of baseball will be branded with a six-by-six logo from the film Spiderman 2 from June 11 to June 13th (in conjunction with the summer release of "Spider-Man 2,") The press release boast of new revenue and connecting kids to baseball in the 21st century. Teams like the Yankees and Sox will receive $100,000 most others franchises will take in $50,000 for the promotion.

The outcry begins ..The network of baseball fans, sports writers kick into action.
League of Fans, Some random guy sets up an online petition 200+ signatures in several hours, discussions at Talk baseball and other sports bulletin boards buzz with disgust, There is talk of baseball and product boycotts. ESPN does an online poll almost 80,000 respond to the poll with 79 percent speaking out against the ads. The story is picked up off the wires onto CNN and Money. Several journalists fire up the fans and detail the disgust with another marketing attack on a traditional pastime. The story begins to feed on itself like a "wildfire". Bob Costa rants on the impact of the ads.

Round 2. May 8, 2004
The public backlash starts to build the PR and executives don't really know where it will stop. The intensity and quick mobilization obviously catch the advertisers off guard. Several owners are cornered and quoted within the day of the launch of the idea. It seems as if commissioner is off guard as people ask them about the advertising. ""It isn't worth, frankly, having a debate about," commissioner Bud Selig told The Associated Press in Oakland before the Yankees-Athletics game." Makes you wonder what the folks at Sony felt. How about all the smaller franchises that could use an extra $50,000 per game? The united front of baseball fell apart.

Everyone wants the issue to go away. Spider-Man stumbles and falls. Hopefully, some advertising wizards get canned.
Major League Baseball officials and Columbia Pictures executives decided to scale back the promotion. There will be no advertising on the bases.

How did this happen? How did a handful of fans capitalize on earned media-cyclone to mobilize a huge constituency to pressure the collapse of a multi-million dollar revenue stream? (assuming future ad campaigns are also DOA?) Most surprisingly, there was no single group of organizations running the anti-ad campaigns. This was an individually driven and an Internet coordinated campaign.

It was a distributed (no central talking points) message with "message volume" trumping message discipline. How did the fans "win" ?

The structure for Network-Centric Advocacy was already in place.

1. Strong Social Ties - Fans know each other. They talk baseball and have networks of baseball friends that discuss sports regularly. While they may disagree about teams the network of fans share many common values about the game and the way fans should be treated.

2. Common Story - There has been a growing theme among the fans that owners don't care about the game, fans or tradition but only about money. This story fit with that common thread believed by many baseball fans.

3. Common Communications Channels - The sports pages, sports talk radio and sport web sites are a strong common element among a very active base. The ability to "ramp" up the opinion leaders among the fan base was an essential catalyzing force. The message went out to the most active fans via ESPN and other sports net type "hubs". These channels were sounding boards that enabled the fans to fuel the story without MLB being able to effectively counter the chatter across so many discussion boards and sports news stations.

5. Unified Window of Opportunity--- All fans at all games were going to be looking at Spiderman ads. This was clearly an attack on the whole network and therefore unifying the fans. The campaign may have had a very different outcome had Sony only picked a handful of markets to "crack open" the bases-as-billboards approach.

Fans were able to express outrage without "joining" anything. They were able to use their voice and clout without becoming a member of fans against ads or any type of coalition. The nature of the campaign was leaderful (every sports hack with an opinion could direct friends to polls and online petitions ) and yet very targeted at stopping the ads.

Lessons to learn ....
Build strong social ties...identify a common story...develop shared communications channels...