JoNova

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The world was baffled. What were they thinking?

This colossal PR disaster was 20 years in the making, and it took a special set of conditions to achieve a true marketing black hole. Never before in the history of public relations has so much star-power, money and kudos been used to score such a monstrous global own-goal. The campaign to dehumanize skeptics laid the groundwork and somehow, fittingly, the eco-terrorists own name-calling has come back to bite them.

How could people with red carpet careers make a mistake so smashingly spectacularly awful that they scored negative press all round the world, lost 20% of their members, and drove away three out of four major sponsors within days?

They can’t be written off as a little side group of extremists. 10:10 was sponsored by the UK government, major corporations like Sony, and was a group of nearly 100,000 people (now only 73,000). A hundred odd people must have spent months preparing, with casting, scripting and special effects meetings, so they could capture the effect of exploding ten-year-olds without once noticing the rather invidious parallels with, say, Pol Pot. Incredibly the 10:10 […]