Always Check the Link!

Everything on the Internet is bad or porn until proven otherwise.

Oops! CNN.com:

Toy manufacturer Mattel has apologized after mistakenly printing the web address of a pornographic site on the packaging of its newly launched “Wicked” dolls.

Instead of pointing readers to the official website of the movie adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical, information found on boxes of the special edition dolls leads to a page that requires users to be 18 years or older to enter, according to social media users on X.

“Mattel was made aware of a misprint on the packaging of the Mattel Wicked collection dolls, primarily sold in the US, which intended to direct consumers to the official WickedMovie.com landing page,” the company said in a statement sent to CNN on Sunday.

“We deeply regret this unfortunate error and are taking immediate action to remedy this. Parents are advised that the misprinted, incorrect website is not appropriate for children,” it said.

People who have already purchased the dolls are advised to discard the packaging or obscure the link, Mattel added.

“Misprint.” Sure. Like the colors were out of registration. Could happen to anyone.

Honestly, this does not seem like a crisis. If Mattel had accidentally printed a porno URL on packaging for Barbie (25 percent of revenue in 2023), that would have been a crisis! And at that point possibly simpler for them to just go buy out the offending domain, though they’d be in a weak negotiating position. But on the “Wicked” movie tie-in dolls? I don’t anticipate a tearful CEO video apology for this, though I suspect some people in the packaging design and marketing teams got yelled at.

And rightly so! It was careless. Site unseen, what are the chances the domain “wicked.com” is a pornography website? Close to 100 percent, right? If you were doing the packaging for “Kinky Boots” dolls, you’d damn well check the URL before printing the packaging. (There does not seem to be either toys or a dedicated website for “Kinky Boots,” so this is academic.)

I suppose if the domain had been puppiesrompinginmeadows.com you could maybe skate on checking it. But, now that write it down, I assume the furries have claimed that one, so maybe be on the safe side and have a look before you print it on the box.

Psst…did you double check the website address?

Admittedly, I don’t know anything about this stuff. I’m a middle-aged cis guy with a teenage son who made me take him to a Lynyrd Skynyrd show. Musicals aren’t a big deal in my house. I’m worried that the Googling I did while writing this is going to poison my lovingly cultivated Internet ad profile as “man whose main interests are khaki pants, shark videos and electric guitars.” Endless promotions for tickets to “Rent” or, worse, “Cats” are going to stalk me across the Internet like hungry wolves until I relent and have to listen to the 487th Grizabella in history sing “Memory” while she soars into the sky on a tire which, as a longtime cat owner, I absolutely do not buy.

But I think there is a marketing category error here. The whole idea of printing website addresses on movie tie-in product packaging feels very 1998 to me. Maybe it worked for “Gladiator” action figures (dolls for boys) back in the day, but I suspect tween girls aren’t discovering “Wicked” content from URLs on packaging. They’re getting it from Tik Tok. And their parents are just Googling “Wicked tickets,” which, due to the miracle of SEO, leads straight to the websites for the musical and the movie.

Furthermore, the actual wickedmovie.com website is a perfunctory, templatized bore, insofar as I can judge it given my crappy musical theater credentials. The epitome of D-for-effort “I guess we need a website for this, right?” marketing drudgery. If anyone’s career burned for this, I am genuinely sorry, because it wasn’t worth it.

Still, you gotta do the work. And part of the work is checking all the links. Any time I wrote material with links for a corporate site, I clicked on every single one to make sure it took me where it was supposed to. Mostly this was to spot broken links before, you know, the CEO did. But it should work for intercepting accidental porn, too! (Which you also don’t want the CEO discovering in a press release with your name in the footer.)

Here’s a rule of thumb: assume that every domain on the Internet is either bad or porn (or both) until proven otherwise. Statistically it’s probably true, so might as well embrace it and do your due diligence.

We learn these lessons repeatedly. This year is the 20th anniversary of the owner of whitehouse.com, then a porn site, selling the domain to the U.S. government so that people wouldn’t confuse it with the actual White House website, which was whitehouse.gov.

This sort of thing happened a lot back in the day, until it was mostly purchased and litigated out of existence. I worked for a website consultancy in the late nineties, when the domain gold rush was on. A standard bit of advice we gave clients was to immediately register any domain name even peripherally close to their company name, to guard against squatters and spoofers. Don’t forget the hyphens and typos!

In a way, it’s heartwarming to know, nearly thirty years later, that you can still have a perfectly generic, look alike domain name and send America’s unsuspecting tweens and parents straight to porn.

Or at least, you could if that were how anyone used the web in 2024.