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Obscenities spoil search site's publicity stunt

The Local/dl
The Local/dl - [email protected]
Obscenities spoil search site's publicity stunt

An unexpected flood of obscene words forced Swedish internet search service Eniro to shutter a publicity campaign in downtown Stockholm on Thursday shortly after it was launched.

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As part of the campaign, Eniro had erected a giant yellow pillar outside Kulturhuset in Stockholm’s Sergels Torg town square.

From the Eniro website, Swedes were supposed to enter their guess as to what was in the pillar. The guesses entered on the website were then displayed on a large screen on the pillar in Sergels Torg.

The terms which came up on the pillar were also shown on the Enrio campaign’s website in real time through a webcam broadcast.

But it didn’t take long before explicit sexual terms and racial slurs began appearing on the pillar’s screen, infuriating Stockholm city officials who had given Eniro permission to run the campaign.

“This is not good. They haven’t acted in accordance with the permit,” Leif Holm with the Stockholm traffic office told the Resumé newspaper.

Holm told the newspaper that Eniro had “misled” his office in its permit application process, adding that he was considering reporting the matter to police.

Eniro’s marketing manager Jonas Dahlquist was apologetic for the oversight, explaining that the company had come up with a long list of banned terms ahead of the campaign’s launch.

“But apparently people have been more creative than we thought,” he told the Dagens Media newspaper.

He added that Enrio has since expanded the list of banned terms “dramatically”.

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