Challenging the communications establishment with Tilikum

Ever since the release of the American documentary Blackfish, the company SeaWorld Parks & Entertainment has been under a tremendous amount of public scrutiny.  Blackfish initially screened at the Sundance film festival in January 2013 and described the killing of orca trainer Dawn Brancheau by Tilikum, one of SeaWorld’s most popular orcas. That incident was used in the documentary to describe the treatment of orcas in the parks of SeaWorld, and the consequences of keeping these animals in captivity such as additional attacks.

When broadcaster CNN aired Blackfish in October 2013, the documentary led to an international outcry. Continuous negative headlines and celebrities calling upon their fans to no longer visit the theme park turned out to have severe financial consequences.  Over the course of 2014, the enterprise’s shares dropped by more than 40%, which subsequently led to its CEO resigning at the end of the year. In the summer of 2015, the company’s financial report showed an 84% decrease in net income in comparison with the year before, due to a massive decline in attendance. Unsurprisingly, by the end of 2015 the companies’ new CEO announced to phase out the theatrical orca shows in 2016 and 2017.

One of the many answers as to how all of this could have possibly spiralled so enormously out of control is that one should never presume that communications could be controlled, either practically or theoretically.  For starters, the case very effectively shakes up Timothy Coombs’ well-known Situational Crisis Communications Theory (2007). According to Coombs, SeaWorld’s’ PR team should have had an easy job as the crisis would theoretically fall within the accidental cluster (‘some stakeholders claim an organization is operating in an inappropriate manner’), and thus this sort of crisis should have been much easier and less expensive to deal with theoretically speaking than what it turned out to be.

On the other hand, the crisis does support the views of scholars that rather critically reflect upon traditions in communications science. For example, this case supports Davis’ (2000) statement that contrary to popular belief, it is no longer just corporations with financial resources that are able to dominate effective public relations.  Blackfish showed how a non-official source such as a documentary maker was able to upset an opposition dramatically. 

Furthermore, the case supports Valentini’s thesis (2015) that even though the dominant discourse states that social media is an amazing technological development, there is a lack of critical reflection on the implications of social media for organizations and their PR professionals. The disastrous social media campaign that SeaWorld eventually engaged in affected 311 employees severely as they were laid off (most of them supposedly working in the PR department of the company).

In the end, what this case shows is that a crisis did not only turn an entire company upside down – but even a field of science. Blackfish manages to contradict a crisis communications’ scholars’ most popular theory and fully supports those authors that have argued against popular beliefs in the field.

 Jeanette van Eijk studied Public Administration and International Public Policy at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. She worked for several years as a Public Affairs professional in The Hague and Brussels, and enrolled in the University of Amsterdam’s Corporate Communications Master programme in February 2016.