Marketing disasters
Good morning {{first_name}},
It’s been a funny old week over here at Ghost HQ. That's about the most family-friendly way we can describe it. There's a word that rhymes with "duck" that also found extensive application behind the scenes.
In case you missed it, your favourite South African investment website was down for two days after catching a nasty internet bug. If you're wondering what happened and whether your computer may have been affected, the first few minutes of this video explains exactly what hackers did on the website.
Please be vigilant out there - there are a lot of bad actors on the internet, not all of whom are making movies on YouTube.
As Dominique reminded the Ghost a few times this week: "the horrors persist, but so do we!"
So here we are, persisting. Best of all, Weekender is in our snazzy new email format. We hope this makes it even more enjoyable for you!
To lighten the mood, Dominique brings us a spectacular column filled with corporates that have had far worse experiences than a website hack.
When marketing misses the mark
Even the biggest companies are able to score incredible own-goals.
We aren't even talking about being "edgy" or taking a risk on humour - these are outright disasters that should have been spotted. From Starbucks to Heineken, Adidas and Nivea, this is a tale of marketing that misses the market. Or, in extreme cases, completely destroys it.
Read on for a fun (and concerning) reminder of the dangers of skim reading. Hint: it includes signing your soul away. Yikes!
Inspired by this week’s shenanigans, Dominique’s Fast Facts are themed around things that people really shouldn’t have missed.
Have a great Sunday!
The Finance Ghost (follow on X) | Dominique Olivier (connect on LinkedIn)
Terms and conditions may apply - forever
TL;DR: In 2010, a games retailer claimed the immortal souls of 7,500 customers in its terms and conditions.
On April Fool's Day in 2010, the UK games retailer GameStation inserted a new clause into its online terms and conditions. Anyone placing an order that day (and agreeing to the terms and conditions) granted the company "a non-transferable option to claim, for now and for ever more, your immortal soul". A link was provided to opt out, along with a voucher for those who spotted it. Roughly 7,500 people bought something that day. Only 12 claimed the voucher. Everybody else literally sold their soul for the convenience of not scrolling.
Skimmers. Skimmers everywhere!
It was a prank, of course, and GameStop waived its claim shortly afterwards. But it wasn't wrong about the nature of human beings - if given the option to skim something, we will take it.
Researchers Jonathan Obar and Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch tested the same instinct more rigorously in 2016 by building a fake social network and asking students to join. Buried in the terms was a clause about handing over data to the NSA and employers, and another requiring users to surrender their first-born child as payment. 98% of users missed both clauses and agreed to the terms. The average reader spent under a minute on a policy that would have taken half an hour to read properly.
If these examples are anything to go by, then reading is expensive and trust is surprisingly cheap. Maybe part of the reason why people are so happy to skim and click is because they assume that somebody upstream - a regulator, a lawyer, or just someone who cared more than they did - has already looked, and that if the document contained anything genuinely alarming, they'd have heard about it.
Of course, that’s more or less the same error in thinking that led to the South Korean Starbucks debacle that was covered in the column this week.
Yes, we caught you
And while we’re on the subject of skimming things - did we catch you skimming this section, or did you notice that two different gaming companies were mentioned in the first two paragraphs?
The correct games retailer in this story is GameStation, not GameStop. To everyone who spotted it: we can't offer you a voucher (sorry), but we can offer you free lifetime access to the Ghost Mail Weekender newsletter.
It's effective immediately, and backdated to whenever you subscribed. Thank us later.
Dominique’s Fast Facts - “How did they miss that?!?”
In 2008, a French railway operator, SNCF, ordered 2,000 new trains at a cost of €15bn. The trains were built to specifications supplied by the rail network operator, which had only measured platforms built in the last 30 years. But platforms that were older than 30 years were narrower, which means that the trains were too wide to fit past them. As a result of this error, roughly 1,000 platforms had to be shaved down.
In the 1934 second edition of Webster's New International Dictionary, an index card reading "D or d", meaning density could be abbreviated by capital or lowercase d, was misinterpreted as a single run-together word. "D or d” became “Dord", was duly given a pronunciation, marked as a noun, and defined as a physics and chemistry term for density. How it got past the final reader, the etymologist and the proofreader, we'll never know. It sat in the dictionary from 1934 until an editor in 1939 noticed the entry had no etymology, and it appeared in more than one printing from 1934 to 1947.
In 1631, royal printers Robert Barker and Martin Lucas set out to reprint the King James Bible word for word, and unfortunately they managed to miss one. In the Ten Commandments, they accidentally omitted a single “not”, and as a result Exodus 20:14 came off the press reading "Thou shalt commit adultery". Around a thousand copies were printed and distributed before anyone noticed. When the error surfaced a year later, the two were summoned before the Star Chamber, fined £300 (roughly a working lifetime's wages) and stripped of their printing licence.