Why ‘Cancelling’ Events (almost) Always Backfires

The Issue Of Small Party Mindset And Giving Your Rivals Free Publicity

In the past I have worked as the marketing and PR lead for a small amount of big events, solely in the healthcare and innovation sectors.

These were million dollar events covering big and complex subject matters, attracting and appealing to niche and highly global specialist audiences.

All of this is to say, while I've done ‘events’, I’ve never actually been responsible for something that relied on ticket sales - pure selling. That’s a completely different game to dealing with the likes of IBM, Kaiser Permanente, and the Qatari government. 

Event sales, when you need to get butts in seats, is a game far more reliant on the need to create both a sense of importance and urgency. The budgets tend to be very limited, and ‘earned media’ (getting news stories and public attention you don’t play for) is vital to your success. 

It may sound easier to sell a $20 ticket than a $2000 ticket, but in my experience the opposite is true. Anyone with a $2000 budget for an event ticket can more easily drop that $2000 without worry, a $20 budget requires more discernment.

If I was in-charge of a politically controversial event, I would be praying for backlash. The bigger and more widespread, the better.

In this context, City councillor Nīkau Wi Neera’s attempt to cancel new and relatively unknown group Inflection Point NZ’s ‘Unsilenced Summit’ would have been an absolute blessing for them. 

If, and it’s a big IF, Neera actually wants to stop the spread of discourse he finds contemptuous, he has failed massively and publicly. 

By complaining in the mainstream media and on social media, he has spread awareness further than any ad buy would have.

By doubling down, he has made himself seem like the unreasonable party.

By trying to impede the free speech of a group who have stated they are against “indoctrination” he has accidentally positioned himself as the inflexible zealot. 

This is exactly how public debates are lost. In Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry’s rare successes occur when he can prove that he is on the side of reason and his opponent is being unfair and unreasonable. 

Neera has made himself the ‘Soup Nazi’. 

Not everyone will see it this way, some people opposed to the event will be grateful that he has been so vocal that he believes this event should not be held at a council owned venue (or possibly anywhere). 

This is the politics of small parties and minor gains. In a national debate where people like him should be aiming to convince the majority of the nation, Neera and others are defaulting to the traditional political actions of an ignored and dis-empowered minority group grasping for attention. 

This is in spite of him being an elected councillor, surrounded by supportive fellow Green councillors and a Green mayor, having the support of the two nearest local MP’s to the event site, both members of his party. It is checkers thinking in a chess match. 

This Tuesday, I was on Radio NZ’s Mata with Mihi Forbes to discuss the news of the day, which at the time included Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters ‘Fair Access To Bathrooms Bill’. 

I’m not an expert on the issues covered by the bill, and it’s important that I don’t try to impose an uneducated take on something that really matters to others but doesn’t affect me personally, so I stuck to what I know - political strategy and public relations. 

I said it would never pass because it doesn’t have the support of National, but it is a classic koro Winnie move where he identifies an untapped voter base and offers them a home and his loud voice.

If he stacks enough passionate single issue voters together, he gets over the five percent MMP threshold and is free to cut a deal with whoever offers him, not his collection of voter bases but him personally, the best deal. 

That, in two sentences, is the political game small parties play.

It is why friends of mine in the Greens have complained that they can’t get social justice policies unanimously supported internally because they face opposition from the old school anti-GMO wing of the party. A wing of largely single issue voters.

It is why I wrote in my column for Newstalk ZB Plus that the high-point of Chloe Swarbrick’s political career will be as a popular Green Party leader, not as Prime Minister. Green supporters were very mad at me online, but more than one Green staffer mournfully agreed in private.

Small parties rely on big parties to give them fuel and relevance. This same small party mindset has led a city councillor with far more political capital and name recognition than his start-up underdog opponents to play right into their hands. 

Progressive political success story, former Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, succeeded in gaining a Parliamentary majority by uniting left and centre voters around her message of optimism and positivity. During her pomp, she rarely needed to acknowledge an opposition, because she had made them seem irrelevant. 

Nikau Ni Weera will never be Jacinda Ardern.

Chloe Swarbrick will never be Jacinda Ardern.

Not because Ardern was an untouchable political genius, but because she presented herself as the leader of a movement that had its own momentum.

Momentum that didn’t rely on shouting down opponents to fuel it, if anything they were more guilty of overly ignoring any opposition, instead they succeeded by choking their opposition of any airtime at all.

Those daily press conferences created a snake-like grip on political discourse. 

This is why the efficacy of ‘cancelling’ is facing a reckoning - no longer does it starve your opposition of attention, it actually feeds them. 

Inflection Point NZ have been laid out a veritable feast by Neera, one that (had they hired someone like me) would have cost them tens of thousands of dollars, all for free.

They will be quietly thanking him for his generous donation.