Mars Candy Sends Women Seeking New 'Fling' to Porn Site. Ooops!

This is where you land if you read about Mars Candy's new 85-calorie Fling chocolate bar, which is aimed at women, and you - logically, were to type in www.fling.com.Ooops!

This 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!

Mars is not the first to make this mistake, and they won't be the last. When Dell launched its Direct2Dell blog, they called it One2One. But they failed to check the URL and to learn that one2one was actually a scuzzy porn site.

The Internet is not for practice guys! It's for all the marbles. Use your head, or lose the game.

Bonus link: When Edelman PR set up the much-maligned Working Families for Wal-Mart they didn't register the domain name. They registered www.forwalmart.com. The most logical domain, www.workingfamiliesforwalmart.com, was kidnapped by an anti-Wal-Mart group that launched a pretty good parody site. All the smiling faces in the original are replaced by sad ones in the parody.

Posted by B.L. Ochman

Thanks for highlighting such as simple, but eventually costly mistake.

Heh. Jessica Gottlieb recently posted this screen shot of a Wal-Mart webpage that had a porn ad. It never ends.

I'm not supposed to think this is hysterical...

But really, when a housewife with a jug of wine knew better, why didn't the suits?

Ha ha that's funny. I imagine the suits didn't do enough research. Why did they not check out the URL before? School boy error.

Okay, first off, it's not a porn site, but that's splitting hairs. The sad thing is, Mars' marketing people MUST have known the hookup site was out there, because they would have found out when they tried to buy the fling.com name. My guess is that they just incorrectly and naively assumed that people only get to your web site using the link you give them. That's just not right. Most people type the product name into the search bar (if they're search-oriented) or into the address bar (if they're feeling lucky). So the real detective work has to begin when you're naming the product or service, not after you've named it and are trying to find a suitable domain name.

Glad to see they launch a multi-million dollar campaign for a product they aim to be worth billions over its lifetime without spending a few hundred thousands to buy fling.com

lol. This reflects old school trademark thinking. Companies like Mars (I used to work there) have lists of hundreds of names they trademarked back when the bears were bad. They dig one out when they have a new product to launch. What they need to do is throw away the old trademarks and register new ones which have a dot com available. I suspect that's going to be cheaper than buying URLs of already registered trademarks.

Interesting find BL. It's surprising that Mars didn't buy Adwords redirecting people to something like "Click here for the Fling Chocolate website" - when you type in "Fling." That would at least acknowledge the two are different.

This is way too funny. I never had a candy bar quite like that before. Reminds me of many many many years back the USPS had a similar issue (which has now been resolved). Way back when, if you were to type in www.USPS.com you were sent to a porn site, but that has all been resolved now. Now you can get to the USPS by either www.USPS.gov OR
www.USPS.com
-- but it didn't use to be that way!! :)

Classic. I could not stop laughing when I read the post about the goof up by Mars.

You'd think that Mars could have it's own top-level domain. I mean if Tuvalu gets .tv, why can't the red planet have .mars?