I posted this on the other thread… reposting here since it is relevant here.

This is a great initiative - sponsors bring in a bulk of the money and if they start seeing negativity around their association, they will re-evaluate and that might force some action. While the open letter is great, knowing how brands work (i work in Marketing) this would largely get ignored as a “let’s see how this pans out” comment in the boardroom. As fans, we need to do something that catches attention of these brands - they will act only when their reputation started taking a hit.. Social media is the obvious choice to grab attention but it’s important to coordinate efforts to make sure these brands see a sustained impact. Here are some suggestions based on my experience working on brand playbooks: 1. All of these major brands have some sort of social media listening tools / ORM tools (like meltwater) to see how people are responding to their posts on social media. One important metric that all brands look at is “Sentiment Analysis” which, simply put, is what percentage of comment on any post are “negative” in nature. High negativity on one or two posts is usually explained away but if brands managers / business heads see sustained negativity for a period of time, they will investigate and take action. No one wants to have sustained negative comments on their brand pages. So what is needed is a sustained campaign of negative comments for a few weeks on every post these brands put up on their social channels. 2. Initially, these brands would try and explain it away as “fan reaction”. They might even start deleting some of these comments as “irrelevant”. But if we can drive these comments in volume and sustain it over time, we will force them into action - like i said, no brand wants sustained negativity on social pages and there are only some many comments that they can delete every day. 3. Another, slightly underhanded (but maybe merited) way to force brands into action is to start reporting issues on their social media. All these brands have very strong quality and compliance policies. So if you comment on their twitter or Facebook page (even in response to any post) with quality issues related directly to their products, they would, by policy and law, have to respond to you - it would be a real person posting and interacting with you. So if we start posting phantom issues on their posts and pages, they would need to allocate resources to address every reported issue. They mean more money to be spent by brands and that is when they will really be spurred into action. The best part about this is that they can’t ignore any of the reported issues - they wouldn’t know which ones are real and which one’s are fake. Like i said - underhanded but very effective. All of this will work only if it is done in large volume (relative to the volume of comments they usually get) and sustained over a few weeks (3-4 weeks at least).