If you’ve been on Twitter today (or /gamergatehq/) you’ve probably already heard this news. But since many of you may have missed it, I wanted to make sure it got some coverage here as well. It’s about emails, and how well they’ve worked over the course of our campaign. As it turns out, they’ve been amazingly successful. I know that I’ve put less focus on them myself over the last couple of months, but now that we’re digging in again for the long-haul, it’s important to put some more shine back on the email operation (#DisrespectfulNod).
Here’s what Acid Man had to say about the whole thing in a thread early this morning (here’s an email list as well):
As some of you know, I was the person who volunteered to scout the journo sites back in January and gather new lists of advertisers. Because of that activity, I have a very in-depth perspective on just exactly how effective Disrespectful Nod has been.
#GamerGate, you don’t know what the hell you all have done.
Let me put this in perspective for you all.
The journo sites, at the end of January when the updates were finished? The original O:DN advertiser list that we targeted with emails through all of September, October, November, and December? You killed them all.
Every. Single. Normal. Advertiser. Pulled. Out.
All of them. At every site. The updated ad list was 100% new targets across the board.
Do you know where Gawkers “seven digits” came from? Gawker’s main site was a WASTELAND of advertisements when I went back to do their update. Where once were ad boxes and pop-ups galore, there was only a single native ad link. ONE.
We left Gawker fucking sterile.
What happened was what we had expected to happen. After all the drama by aGGro over Intel dropping Gamasutra, the remaining advertisers saw the writing on the wall.
None of those who were left renewed their ad contracts with the journo sites at the end of the year. NONE. Not even INTEL. On Jan 1 they dropped Gamasutra AGAIN and didn’t tell anyone a thing about it.
Quiet ad pulls that stripped most of the sites of their remaining income and forced them into using tons and tons of Google aggregated ads and native advertisements (product shilling articles.)
FROM THE WAY PEOPLE TALK YOU ALL HAVE NO FUCKING IDEA HOW MUCH DAMAGE DISRESPECTFUL NOD HAS CAUSED.
The journo sites are surviving on life support, and have been for months!
Now is not the time to even CONSIDER stopping the email train. O:DN was, is, and shall remain the sword that slays the dragon.
This thread will be stickied to facilitate daily email goals targeting advertisers who remain. Many of these will be aggregated ads that we can only marginally affect – but we have options there also. Native ads we can destroy without mercy.
Carry on, #GamerGate. We are fucking winning this war. Emails are a grind, but we’re due to level up. :3
He wasn’t the only one to weigh in. A copywriter with YellowBoxAdvertising also gave his thoughts on the effectiveness of our pressure campaign:
There’s been a development though, allegedly, that a certain favorite “media news” website has lost a lot of former advertisers and picked up new ones. I’ll get this out of the way: a lot of you are saying you didn’t always get responses when you e-mailed, and if you think about the possible volume of e-mails sponsors/advertisers were getting for 8 months, that’s not honestly surprising. With limited work hours in the day and e-mails pouring in constantly, only so many responses would happen. No doubt those responses would be carefully curated and form written.
That’s not the point though. Don’t expect any official validation from the people you e-mailed, mostly because people saw what happened to Adobe, Intel, Google (with the image), Dyson, and of course the Coca Cola Mein Kampf incident. If you DO get validation be absolutely certain you cover up e-mail address names and other revealing information (yes you most likely can find this contact info on a corporation or businesses’s website, but showing it in a image in a highly visible place is another story). NO BUSINESS or NAME BRAND wants unnecessary attention that will take up their time, and no marketer or advertiser wants to have a meeting about why they were in their inbox all day and they’re behind on X, Y, and Z project. Time with the press or media is ideally for a fun, exciting campaign, not PR 101 because someone got the entire business in the middle of an ongoing Internet fiasco…
My opinion: people will keep taking note of what happens when the consumer is ignored because at the end of the day all of us still have jobs to do instead of read emails all day. People will also see and learn that certain websites have very little business sense, cause drama, and attract unwanted attention. Or just outright insult business partners.
We have to redouble efforts on the email front. I sent some today myself for the first time in like three weeks. I suggest that anyone else who has fallen behind catch back up. All you have to do is send one or two a day. Or, sit down once a week and send seven or eight of those bad boys. We’ve proven that it works. There might not be any more announcements like back in the fall, but these emails still have a cumulative effect. So keep pushing hard on that front. I know I will.
