By Lidia Naskova
(Travis Nichols, Arctic communications manager at Greenpeace in The Columbia Journalism Review, November, 2014).
The benefits of using media activism online are many nowadays and I found two very interesting examples of where smart online media strategies may help social movement organizations to get messages rapidly out to the public, alter the public opinion about a matter or raise awareness, and consequently changing decisions with the help from the pressure from consumers.
In 2014, the environmental organization Greenpeace launched a YouTube video that was part of a campaign set out to pressure the company Lego to dissociate them from a partnership with the oil-company Shell that had been going on since the 1960s. Greenpeace targeted Lego as a part of a viral protest against Shell’s plans to drill after oil in the Arctic, and in the video, Lego characters were demonstratively placed in a Lego-built Arctic getting slowly covered with oil, along with the slogan that “Lego: everything is NOT awesome”. Continue reading →