Mattel apologises after Wicked movie dolls link to porn site on packaging | Hacker News Reader

Mattel apologises after Wicked movie dolls link to porn site on packaging

theguardian.com

49 pointsthm23 comments

In a similar vein, a former medium-sized client of mine had a retail / b2c product range launch and used identical placeholder EAN bar codes for each variant of the range. All the SKUs + their variants (around 200, from memory) had to be quietly recalled when retailers noted all the products had the same EAN - which turned out to be the 330ml Coke can that the designer had on their desk when they mocked up the bar code.

Edit: removed EAN.

> The web address listed on the boxed dolls is wicked.com, instead of wickedmovie.com

Ooof. Kind of funny, but I hate to think about the volume of waste such a tiny packaging mistake has caused.

You mean all this advertising?

(Am I becoming overly cynical?)

Happened in the UK too with PawPatrol snacks a while back.

"At the time of writing, the desktop website — appykidsco.com — loads either a blank page with a message in Chinese containing search engine keywords or an error message. But when the website is opened from a device with a smaller screen, such as a phone, the website displays as a holding page with numerous ads containing animated explicit and pornographic images."

https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/01/lidl-recalls-paw-patrol-sn...

Although in this case, the minor difference was that the domain started off correct, but was later re-sold and repurposed.

I own a random domain as a personal website. A few months ago, I started getting a lot of spam emails addressed to a person who wasn't me, inquiring about writing apps or websites for their business. I looked it up and there's a restaurant that uses the same name as my website on the other side of the country, and I guess they printed cards or menus or something assuming the domain was available.

Is the name if restaurant "Mystery Dip"?

If it was, I'd totally go there :) no, I used a more "professional sounding" domain.

If a child has unrestricted access to the Internet, idk how they won't find porn, not giving them a direct URL will delay it for only a little while.

When I was a kid and my parents bought me LEGO, I didn't have to check the box for the URL to go on their website. There are content filters for families that want extra insulation. What a non-issue.

Damn, sucks to be that guy who made the conscious decision to print the URL without even checking it once. Or maybe, he did it out of spite? I don't see any more reasons why.

It probably wasn't even a conscious decision. It's easy to imagine a young parent on 2 hours of sleep operating on autopilot and remembering incorrectly that the URL was "wicked.com". Or perhaps they just lost a parent and can't focus properly.

There's hundreds of possible reasons besides malice and laziness.

The reason is: they didn't have a separate person checking it.

Agreed - this is a failure of process, assigning blame to an individual is futile

OR wicked.com might have been blocked on that person's computer. They may have thought the website is down under load or something else or that their companies URL filter is stupid and keeps blocking harmless/new sites anyway.

Replacing the url by the one they originally intended to use makes no sense.

I mean, if they can't even get the url right, how do they expect 100% of little girls to type it in correctly?

One of those two situations is a lot easier to lose a lawsuit over.

Not so sure, they just made their case a lot weaker.

This is why you always use an URL shortner with an edit function in QR codes.

I don't believe they were using QR codes at all. They just printed the wrong URL, which they still could have done when using a URL shortener.

And if you were going to use a URL shortener, you want to use one that you either have a vendor relationship with or you own the domain. Otherwise the shortened URL could change to something and you'll have no control.

What if the packaging is designed before the website is live and the URL shortener link is something random off the internet? There's a lot of things that can go wrong still.

I did see for a while that instead of a website, adverts would show a search bar and the search term to use. Since that's how a lot of people interact with the internet, filling in e.g. "wicked.com" into google instead of the URL bar. Which is also why Google just combined the two in Chrome.

edit for completeness: do not go to wicked.com, it's a porn site.

If you mistype the URL to the URL shortener...

They'll use AI for everything except proofreading packaging contents.

Just asking the free version of any LLM service would've caught that in a few seconds.

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