Join my petition against online petitions
No stranger to an angry mob, Paul Merrill leaps to the defence of magazines as online petitions attempt to bring them down.
Magazines are under attack. First Zoo was forced into a grovelling apology for running a competition to find the ‘Hottest asylum seeker’ and then Cleo was pilloried for retouching models. In both cases, the weapon of choice was the online petition.
Unlike petitions where you’re stopped in the street, these simply need the click of a button and hey presto, it’s sent off to those concerned. They spread like wild fire through social media and are latched onto by newspapers as evidence of public opinion. Just look at the one targeting the advertisers on Alan Jones’s show running into the tens or hundreds of thousands. Overwhelming public opinion? Well, maybe, but still some way short of his breakfast audience who are probably wondering what the fuss is all about.
In the case of the one aimed at Zoo (for a competition I’d already run two years earlier that obviously went under the radar), I wonder how many of the signatories would have been as committed if they’d known it was organised by a fundamentalist Christian whose organisation believes the Bible is the absolute word of God. Last time I looked, the Bible wasn’t particularly liberal in its views on abortion, slavery, rape, homosexuality and women’s rights. Out of Zoo and the Old Testament, I know which I find the most offensive.
While I know this is somewhat tongue in cheek, isn’t joining a petition against online petitions akin to democratically voting in a tyrannical dictator?
https://staging.mumbrella.com.au/meet-zoos-idea-of-a-topless-woman-120366
I’d like to start a petition against crappy polls.
“First Zoo was forced into a grovelling apology for running a competition to find the ‘Hottest asylum seeker’ … ”
Don’t you mean to say “Zoo weekly *decided* to apologise …”? Who forced you? Were you compelled by an authority or government? If you believed strongly in what you were putting forward why didn’t you defend your freedom to publish it?
Fair point, Luke, though I don’t work at Zoo anymore. I guess the point here is that the online petition gave the complaint a significance it didn’t necessarily deserve. If there is genuine public outcry, then that’s different. This particular one was one guy (rather successfully) whipping up a false anger.
no Luke he means exactly what he says, just like Alan Jones’ advertisers were bullied into submission by the feral online lynch mob
there’s only so much hate mail a person can take – and companies are actually people
Clearly still in denial, with some anger still festering. Some people just don’t get it.
Nell, if advertisers are willing to lie down with dogs, then they should be prepared for the flea bites.
Online petitions, just like Kony 2012, give lazy human beings a warm, fuzzy feeling that they are changing the world. Instead of actually researching what they are signing up for, or agreeing to, they take a snippet from a biased source and take it as fact, as they need to be spoon fed any information they receive.
When it actually comes down to any real action, these button pushers are nowhere to be seen. Just like every other situation, the Jones saga will pass, and the advertisers will all return. And next week we will be spammed with another ‘save the world’ online petition.
I agree Nell I feel it’s getting a little out of control – the empowerment of so many small minds is giving business a headache.
NMo, magazines are not under attack, any more than radio isunder attack. It’s piss poor behaviour and abuses of positions of responsibility that are under attack.
I really couldn’t care less if it was religious crazies who organised a petition against Zoo’s distasteful and belittling asylum seeker promotion, of if it was god himself – the point is, somebody took the initiative to say no, that’s not OK. And that’s a good thing.
For marketing professionals, there’s an awful lot of complaining about people campaigning. You do it for a living, no? Embrace it – this is new media.
Anyone aware of the study comparing language of rapists and lads mags like Zoo?
Oh former editor of Zoo, please share more of your wisdom.
Slacktivism means marketers need to rethink complaint evaluation.
Breadth of complaint no longer automatically implies depth, and a few thousand emails can no longer claim to be representative of community outrage, just mobilised niche mobthink.
Can’t be long until marketers/business owners start saying – “i don’t give a toss what you think about my (ads/product/opinion/media choices/perceived wrongdoing) it’s working for me so i’m sticking with it”.
Marketing is about compromises, focusing on what will get you where you want to be at the expense of what doesn’t matter. A lot of these things don’t matter and should start being flagrantly ignored.
We all know what happens when you try to please everyone – you end up pleasing no-one.
In the case of the Hottest Asylum Seeker contest, unless Zoo Weekly received an inordinate amount of feedback from it’s readers it should have said “get stuffed”, not sorry.
If the Zoo example is just “whipped up public anger”, a fringe viewpoint only held by a handful of people (after all, only 5,000 people signed the online petition), why did the editors apologise?
Either the editors think the petition did reflect a “genuine public outcry”, had a valid point, or both.
Online petitions are convenient enough to get a large enough audience, so it’s easy to disregard them. However, when young girls, often the targets of these magazines, grow up with these images of women who are airbrushed and presented as these superhuman beings, then it does have an effect.
Young people are impressionable. They look up to the Taylor Swifts, the Gaga’s and the rest because they want to follow someone. When they grow up with seeing these images presented to them, then they think that’s normal.
Bit of common sense is all it needs. Factor in the weight of people’s objections and act accordingly. Just like you would with ads.
You shouldn’t pull an ad because it gets two complaints, because it’s not an accurate reflection of public opinion. So don’t do the same with small-scale online petitions.
But if something gets a huge groundswell of support, like the Alan Jones petition clearly did, then it’s worth reacting.