Mars Sends Women Seeking New 'Fling' to Porn Site
It's Counting on Customers to Pay Attention to URL
The site on the left is where you would land if you read about Mars' new 85-calorie Fling chocolate bar, which is aimed at women, and -- logically -- typed in www.fling.com. Ooops!
The one on the right is where Mars -- whose agency and marketing people apparently didn't check to see who else might own a URL related to their product name -- means to send you. Ooops!
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Mars is not the first to make this mistake, and it won't be the last. When Dell launched its Direct2Dell blog, it called it One2One. But it failed to check the URL and learn that one2one is a scuzzy porn site.
The internet is not for practice, guys. It's for all the marbles. Use your head or lose the game.
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B.L. Ochman is a marketing strategist and blogger and can be found Twittering, at WhatsNextOnline.com or with her newest venture, Pawfun.com.
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It says that if you read their ad, then you get the hook-up site, which is where they sent you because their creative was wrong and didn't have the full URL.
BL
funny to get the URL wrong in a post about wrong URLs.
Shall we say FAIL?!?
I think someone in both the brand marketers and the agency actually knew loud and clear about the fling.com because you have with both sites the same "suggestiveness". This "conspiracy" had to get past the Creative gateway, the account services gateway, the brand manager gateway, the testing gateways.... Yes, it's possible to have that many people not know about related web sites on the campaign you are pitching... just not likely giving the life cycle of developing one FLING and not catching other UH oh WOW! FLING.
Misses:
Lack of Search Strategy on "FLING"
Lack of Testing
Lack of insights on web culture being a place of interaction and not of digital push campaigns.
Langston Richardson, Chief Digital Brand Strategist
Twitter: @MATSNL65 @infuz @lazbro
URL: langstonrichardson.com
it's a schoolchild mistake to ignore such basic stuff, and not to think about all the women, including this one, who find the porn connection gross.
If you use the bar of "product names that might have a porn-related URL" then we'd never have any new product names launched. Not to mention that those brands that have original names end up attracting porn sites that buy up URLs with misspellings of the brand name in hopes of a mistake in typing.
Let's get real here.
there are still plenty of possible names for products that are not shared by porn sites, and there were lots URL options for Mars that were more logical than flingchocolate.com.
if someone wants to pay me to do it, i'll find a bunch of other available URLs that won't lead to a porn site. :>)
as the classic "Positioning" noted, only the first can get share of mind. so if a porn site picked up on the URL *after* fling candybar made its mark, it wouldn't matter so much.