This ad has been here for years, and always bemuses me. Why advertise a Leeds newspaper in Newcastle? Why would a newspaper report on private individuals’ nefarious activities?

I’m sure there’s some (probably football related) subtext that completely passes me by.

To promote their new website, the advertising company SA Group staged a bizarre stunt in which they dangled a person in front of a billboard during rush hour last week. It caught my eye as I drove past, and I ended up Googling the company involved. Here cometh the company’s video of the stunt:

Billboard Corruption PR Stunt from SA Group on Vimeo.

Yes, I know that the stunt has got me talking about and linking to the company and so in that sense has been a success, but I can’t help thinking that their Press Release about the event will ruffle a few feathers.

You’ll note their headline – “Newcastle Billboard Stunt” – and their claim that

Known as billboard corruption www.sagroupuk.com targeted rush hour traffic with a head turning billboard message supported with a live kidnap stunt where a person was suspended from the top of a billboard in Newcastle City Centre.

All very well, except for the minor fact that this happened in Gateshead, not Newcastle, and next to the B1600, not exactly the city centre of either Gateshead or Newcastle. They’re based in the North East themselves, so surely they know the difference?

And given that my attention wasn’t exactly focused on the poster’s logo, when I came to Google the stunt, it was very difficult to find any information as to who the advertiser was – as I naturally wasn’t searching for “Newcastle City Centre”, since it happened in a different city. Even substituting the city for Newcastle, only the narrowest possible search terms bring up any results – and then we’re talking about the above Vimeo video, rather than the company’s own site.

I’m sure their “billboard corruption” makes for wonderful PR, but these guys really need to work on their web approach. I don’t know whether they bought some AdWords nearer the time and I just missed the campaign, but surely I’m not the only one looking this up a couple of days later.

So, in summary: Eye catching stunt, geography and web strategy need some serious work.

Less than four hours after I exclusively reported the Theatre Royal’s web oopsie, they’ve fixed it. A new email has gone out with a new, unique temporary password for each user.

Loophole closed, and an sjhoward.co.uk win!

Theatre Royal, Newcastle upon Tyne

The Theatre Royal in Newcastle (the Northern Home of the Royal Shakespeare Company) has a new website today, developed by Firechaser.

I don’t know about chasing a fire, but they may need to extinguish a virtual one soon.

The Theatre has emailed me to say that my details have been moved over to the new site, and I should login with my email address and the temporary password of “theatreroyal”.

Yes, logging in with my email address and that pisspoor non-unique standardised password will give you access to all of my personal data – including my phone number, address, and theatrical interests – plus the opportunity to change my password and lock me out of my own account. Or at least it would, if I hadn’t changed my password.

That is a clear and obvious breach of the Data Protection Act’s security requirements – plus, it’s frankly astounding that anyone thought it would be okay. Let’s hope they wise-up soon.

Photo by Stephen Douglas, used under licence

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