It is said there is no such thing as bad publicity and BC Ferries’ recent experiment with crowd sourcing name ideas may bear that out.
On Tuesday, May 19, BC Ferries announced its naming contests for the three intermediate-class vessels currently being built in Poland.
The first will replace the rusty Queen of Burnaby that ploughs the strait between Westview and Little River. That ferry is due to enter service at the end of 2016. The others will replace the Queen of Nanaimo and provide the corporation with a spare just in case.
Entries to the contest are to follow guidelines including having the name contain two parts, the first to denote the vessel class and the second descriptive without geographic, biographic or historical reference. Names needed to be gender neutral and can not include any of the previous class names of ferries already in service. So no Queens, Spirits or Islands. Coastal Renaissance was given as an example. Critics said that the guidelines were too confining, made it difficult to find a name which reflected West Coast culture and were basically no fun.
The ferry corporation invited the public to respond on social media using the #nameaferry hashtag, and did they ever, guidelines be damned in some cases.
SS ShouldaBeenaBridge, Spirit of the WalletSucker and The Christy Clark Ark are a few of the many notable entries.
It is partly for this reason that this approach may have worked so well.
Major media was quick to call the attempt to crowd source the name a failure. It characterized the ideas as a backlash against the corporation which has increased fares and reduced service over recent years.
BC Ferries, though, is taking it in stride. As media outlets started picking up the story and the story developed, the hashtag started trending which brought further notice of the campaign. By the weekend Deborah Marshall reported that over 4,000 entries had been received with about 80 per cent of them up for consideration. She told reporters that while they expected some naysayers the majority of the posts have been humorous.
In a few years after the vessel is in service and the Queen of Burnaby is nothing but a distant rusty memory, this supposed “faux pas” will not be remembered, only the funny names people came up with.
There is no word if The Christy Clark Ark made the cut or not.
