Someone at Mattel might find themselves explaining a very awkward oversight after the weekend. A Wicked doll has shipped with an instruction manual which contains a link to an adult website and not the official website of the Wicked movie or Wicked musical.
Wicked Toy Links to Adult Website
Wicked has just completed a run in Dublin from 23rd July to 14th September 2024 and is currently in cinemas worldwide. As is usually the case, this means Universal Studios has commissioned merchandise to capitalise from growing interest in the franchise. On this particular occassion, Universal turned to Mattel. Naturally, Mattel is a highly reputable toy maker and is the company behind Barbie, Hot Wheels and many more family favourites.
Which makes it even funnier, or maybe slightly more worrying, that people who have bought Wicked memorabilia which links to a porn site. The specific toy is the Singing Elphaba Fashion Doll and Accessories, model number HYM40.
In the box of this toy can be found an instruction manual which highlights wicked.com as the official website to go with the toy. Unfortunately for Universal and for Mattel, that is an adult website. The website linked to from this toy has adult content and live webcams for viewers to watch. All of which, as you might imagine, is quite x-rated.
Feeling Sorry For Someone
It’s completely natural at this point to feel sorry for some poor divil in the marketing teams over at Universal or Mattel. Trust me, I know. Goosed has had surprisingly similar issues.
But someone signed this off and just didn’t catch that the most logical website wasn’t the actual website linked to the brand.
If you are a marketing person; learn from this. You should, at the very least, double check all links that you include in print media. But I also strongly recommend that no link ever goes out that you can’t change down the line. There are URL shorteners that let you retain control of links over time and even companies, like Rebrandly, that let you have a branded link you change over time too.
For now, I’d wager that Mattel is going to likely issue a recall and reprint these instruction manuals. But they’re not moving all that quickly. The images I’ve used for this article have been taken from the Mattel website where you can still see the manual and the adult website. It should remain on the WayBack machine too.
Not that you’d be into that sort of thing.
