It has been a spring of online campaigning in Finland. It all started before the Finnish national finals, where a viral e-mail campaign urged people to vote for Lordi. The same people updated their campaign for the big international final via the website www.votelordi.org, where the petition to vote for Lordi was translated to different languages by volunteers. On the eve of the contest the site was closed however, as Lordi’s management feared they would be associated with this campaign. As soon as the victory for Finland was clear, another petition was circulated on the net: “Hands off Eurovision” www.platinum.ac/eurovision07/ (Näpit irti Euroviisuista). This site listed a few points that worried the organizers of the campaign:
Let professional people that have previously shunned Eurovision organize the show
No interval acts with artistic pretensions copied from Athens
Use young artists and independent graphic designers do create the image for the contest, instead of YLE in-house graphics
Have the final in Lapland, where the band is from
The organisers have no trust for "the flowery-hats brigade" that usually organise similar events in Finland, they say. 14408 people have signed this petition by 27 May.
The biggest campaign of them all started, after a celebrity gossip magazine 7 Päivää published the unmasked face of lead singer Tomi Putaansuu on their cover. Lordi had appealed to the Finnish press only days earlier to respect their work and not to ruin the mysticity and fun of the band, and several media had already agreed to do so. As the magazine is usually prominently displayed in front of supermarket check-outs and kiosks, no fan of the band could really avoid seeing it, even if they did not want to. The first petition at boikotoikaaseiskaa.tk/ urged people to write to the magazine, cancel their subscriptions and turn the magazine upside down in the shop displays. The campaign was extended to all publications of the publisher Aller Julkaisut Oy . The petition itself has 220.543 signatures (Sat afternoon 27 May), from over 100.000 unique IP-addresses, see info in English at www.adressit.com/english/lordi.
The magazine eventually published an apology, removed the offending picture from its website and a planned demonstration outside the publisher’s offices never materialized. Lordi the band itself urged the public not to ruin Friday night’s celebrations by acts of revenge towards the media.
All in all, it all is media play on a scale Finland has probably never seen before.
Helsingin Sanomat article on the 7 päivää-case in English: Lordi fans furious at "outing" by gossip magazine