Radio host Shaun "ShaunOMac" Daily began his association with Jericho EP Carol Barbee on the October 17, 2006 edition of Subject2Discussion.

The announcement came at about 4PM Eastern time on Wednesday afternoon in a post on the CBS message boards from entertainment President, Nina Tassler. Jericho, had been saved by the efforts of its fans. The Jericho fan campaigns resulted in some truly impressive statistics. Just over 20 tons of peanuts (nearly 8 million individual nuts) were shipped to CBS offices in New York and Los Angeles. Approximately sixteen thousand dollars was raised for charity; full page ads appeared in Variety and Hollywood Reporter, and thousands of letters, emails, faxes, and phone calls tied up the CBS infrastructure. The actual final tallies are likely to climb higher as last minute orders and donations are tabulated, and the campaign’s charity effort remains in high gear.

This campaign is not the first fans have pulled together in an attempt to change the mind of a network that was canceling a beloved show, nor is it the largest such effort. The Star Trek letter writing campaign in the late 1960’s was started by the husband and wife team of John and Bjo Trimble, and resulted in more than 1 million letters being sent to NBC over a period of months. The subsequent campaign to convince President Ford to change the name of America’s first space shuttle from Columbia to Enterprise, in honor of Star Trek, netted nearly the same amount of mail-ins, all before the advent of the internet.

The Jericho campaign is also not the first in which a group of fans organized on the internet, led by a core campaign crew issuing daily orders to flood a network’s communications infrastructure with messages of support, and to flood the mailrooms with a product representative of the show. The campaigns to renew Roswell resulted in more than 35,000 individual bottles of Tabasco sauce sent by nearly 20,000 fans over the 3-season course of that show to ask for renewal first on the WB, then later to ask for a pickup by UPN. Nor is the charity aspect of the campaign unique (the final Roswell tallies place the dollar amounts at over $250,000 raised for charity over the 3 year period), and those campaigns resulted in at least 3 different full page ads in Variety.

These aspects of the Jericho campaign were impressive, and the leaders of these efforts should be applauded for the efficiency, quickness, and thoroughness with which they carried out all of these duties. Without those efforts, the campaign would have floundered. Still, the question arises as to what was so different this time, and is this truly a model that can be adopted by the internet savvy fans who fully embrace the new media that is offered by a show like Jericho and a network like CBS.  It remains to be seen if tactics can be adapted to truly make a measurable increase in the number of viewers for the show when it returns as a mid-season replacement.

There seem to have been three very significant and unique factors that came into play within the Jericho effort that made it different and allowed it to succeed quickly and with such force, where other similar campaigns languished. The first two of these arose early in the show's history when a relationship was established between executive producer Carol Barbee, and talk radio host Shaun (ShaunOMac) Daily. Daily pursued and convinced Barbee to appear on his internet radio broadcast Subject2Discussion on October 17th, 2006. Daily wowed Barbee with his knowledge of even the minutest trivia of the show, and at the time she commented that he might know more about Jericho than the writers.

Barbee would appear on Daily’s subsequent radio show, ShaunOMac Radio, at least two more times before the end of the season, culminating in a call in question and answer session the night before the finale aired. This “reachability” of a show runner and willingness to interact with the fans that were making her show a success, coupled with a unique platform controlled by a dedicated fan who loved the show, would lead to an important ingredient for later success and the first two of the three unique factors.

The nut campaigns actually had their start on May 11th, two days after the finale aired on CBS and a full five days before the formal announcement of the fall schedule by CBS. As internet rumors and pre-announcement drafts of the schedules began to circulate, Shaun Daily called for nuts to be sent to CBS to show the fans' dedication to the show. When the announcement came the following week, the nut bandwagon was already rolling and others jumped in to join the campaign, forming significant structure around the initial idea. Daily would go on to use his platform as a nightly rallying point to bring the troops together. Last week saw an even further connection focused around his show as Jericho’s creators, writers, and stars began coming on for nightly chats with the fans.

NutsOnline CEO Jeffery Braverman helped deliver cases of peanuts in person to CBS New York offices on May 24, 2007.

The third and final aspect of the Jericho campaign that drove it to unique success was the embrace by a young and energetic CEO of an online nut distributor. Jeffrey Braverman thought the first orders of nuts coming into his company through the internet order forms were either a joke, or a case of credit card fraud. When he searched the net, however, and learned about the campaign he grabbed on with both hands and never let go. Quickly creating a blog page that had almost hourly updates of how various aspects of the overall campaigns were going, coupled with the idea of allowing people to pool their resources and contribute to an overall group effort to send nuts caused a massive upsurge in the volumes being sent.

When a real time tracking box was added, showing near instantaneous results as people pooled their money, nut shipments soared. Braverman’s NutsOnline certainly benefited from the publicity as he became the voice of the campaign for both online and major news outlets, but his quick thinking and dedication to the campaign led it to new heights. Braverman himself was responsible for the interesting tweak to the campaign of collecting money for a real Kansas town, Greensburg that was 95% destroyed by a tornado during the finale week of Jericho.

These three factors set the Jericho campaigns apart from fan based initiatives of the past. Shaun Daily’s unique style and personality, coupled with his new platform to inspire the masses were essential. The already established embrace of the fandom by Carol Barbee (cultivated by Daily on the Subject2Discussion radio program and carried over to BlogTalkRadio earlier this year) and the other people associated with the show were also critical. Finally, Braverman’s quick embrace of the concept, and creation of a medium that allowed the nut shipments to reach a massive scale quickly put the effort over the top. When these three unique factors were coupled with the extremely dedicated efforts of the Core Command, as the “official” campaign leaders called themselves, there could be no other result than success.

 

 

Editors Note: On a personal note, as a fan of Jericho, I am very thankful for the efforts of Shaun Daily and Jeffrey Braverman and the leaders of the campaigns for what they have accomplished, and I applaud their efforts. The recognition of the cast, creators, and show runners and their understanding of the significance of what their fans were trying to accomplish is also something that has created good feelings that will likely carry over into increased viewer ship of this wonderful show, and hopefully to many more seasons on the air.

Thank you to all who were involved in bringing Jericho back. You all have my respect and gratitude of Jericho fans everywhere, and the admiration of those who choose to create “New Media”.