Stephen Colbert has won NASA’s International Space Station module naming contest. NASA held a contest allowing the public to decide on the new “living room” module aboard the orbiting outpost of the International Space Station. In keeping with the other modules, called Unity and Harmony, scientists and space employees were urging the name Serenity.

Problem was, the contest allowed write-in suggestions. Leave it to Colbert to game the system. Using his daily faux-news show, he urged his supporters to write-in the name Colbert. According to the Guardian, Colbert received more than 40,000 more votes than the name NASA scientists preferred.

Hedging a little, a NASA spokesperson has stated that the name Colbert will be given the most consideration, but he stated, NASA reserves the right to give the module a more appropriate name.

Practice Pointers:
• Promotion sponsors should always assume that someone is going to “game” their promotion, as Stephen Colbert did, and make adjustments to the rules accordingly.
• In this case, if NASA really didn’t want write-in names, it should not have given voters the option; clients should be advised to only put forth the contest they can tolerate.
• In promotions that involve public voting, such voting should be limited to an intermediate round of voting with the top 5 winners going to a final round, judged by the sponsor.

This entry was posted by Tsan Abrahamson on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 10:23 am and is filed under Promotions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.