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She said if the campaign took a step back and tried to focus on safety again, it wouldn’t be taken seriously. The video of the taxi driver confronting the Uber driver didn’t help either.

“They’ve lost one of their strongest arguments through that one viral video and the ambulances being blocked off,” she said. “The next time they try to use a message around safety, they’ll be laughed at.”

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Social media became a player

The taxi driver protest became “all anyone could talk about,” Finneran-Gingras said, because of how quickly it spread through social media.

Finneran-Gingras, Enterprise Canada’s director of integrated digital campaigns, said that social media adds a level of transparency to public relations campaigns, but when that transparency goes too far it sends a different message.

“The media didn’t need to be on the streets to see all these instances so I think it really hurt the process.”

With how quickly the video of the taxi driver being dragged through the streets and the video of the blocked ambulances spread, the target of the protest changed.

“They were intending for it to be against city hall and it suddenly became against all of Toronto — hell, all of Canada.”

There was no organization

With various taxi companies, associations and drivers involved in Wednesday’s protest, Finneran-Gingras said there was misdirection and no central planning — two key elements for any successful campaign.

“It’s like trying to run an election campaign without parties, with no one driving the bus and no one with a clear message of what you’re trying to achieve,” she said.