Found an old press release from 2012 where a brand tried to blame a typo on 'hackers'

Was cleaning out my email drafts last week and stumbled on a press release I saved from a shoe company back in 2012. They had a typo in a big ad campaign that said 'sale' instead of 'scale' and it messed up their whole product launch. Their fix was saying a hacker group infiltrated their ad server and changed the word. Nobody bought it and sales dropped 14% that quarter. I remember laughing about it with my buddy at the time but now it feels almost quaint compared to the fake apology videos we see today. Has anyone else run into a brand trying to blame technology for a simple human mistake? It worked about as well as you'd think.

2 comments

2 Comments

troy8321mo ago

Man that whole thing really takes me back. It's crazy how brands used to think they could just blame hackers for everything and people would nod along. Remember when that one fast food chain said their twitter account got hacked but it was just some intern who forgot to log out? The internet always finds out eventually. My favorite part about that old press release you found is how seriously they must have sat in a conference room and thought that story would hold up. Feels like we could laugh about it then but now it's just sad how often companies still try the same trick. Makes you wonder how many of those fake apology videos today are just the same playbook with better lighting.

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kaiharris1mo ago

Wait, they actually sat in a room and typed that up like it was gonna work? That's honestly hilarious and depressing at the same time, like they really thought nobody would notice lol.