The Wicked.com snafu is a shocking example of quality control failure.
Toy makers Mattel printed the domain “www.wicked.com” on recently released merchandise to celebrate the upcoming movie Wicked. Instead of using WickedMovie.com as the appropriate domain name, the destination is that of Wicked Entertainment, publishers of “adult entertainment,” aka pornography.
Nothing wrong with the latter, mind you. Legal porn drives a large part of the internet since its inception as a commercial vehicle in the early 1990s. In this case, however, the link to porn is printed on dolls made for kids. Now, that’s truly bad, regardless of the font’s minuscule size.
Registered in 1994, the domain Wicked.com has served the adult entertainment production company well since the summer of 2008. At the time, the domain was most likely sold, having served as a DJ web site for its prior owner(s) for approximately 14 years.
For a Universal Pictures movie that aspires to be bigger than the highly-acclaimed musical, Wicked is not just a dictionary word; it’s a brand that’s associated with the matching .com by default. Fans of the movie or the musical expect to be taken to the official web site by visiting Wicked.com, particularly when it’s printed on official merchandise such as dolls of the movie’s characters.
There are more than 2,700 registered trademarks at the USPTO for “Wicked” but there’s only one .com. As Mattel’s QC failed, the remedy for parents eager to fix the error would be to use a black Sharpie pen and black-out the domain name before handing the merchandise to kids.
Mattel executives might learn a thing or two about domain names after this.
