William Hill cause outrage after a hoard of complaints reveal that Internet users are being automatically diverted to the Apple App store where they are being directed to the William Hill app.
One way of learning how to do marketing the right way is to learn from people who are doing it the wrong way.
Step forward and take a bow Willliam Hill.
The UK Bookmaker has managed to annoy a significant portion of the Internet after thousands of web surfers have been directed to the William Hill App in the Apple store.
It seems that auto-directing code has somehow found it’s way into the inner workings of such websites as The Mirror Online, The Guardian, Huffington Post, Sky Sports, Radio Times and in a nice twist of irony Betfair.
The angered public have gone to Twitter to vent their frustration with many of the complaints centred around iPhone’s crashing just after being directed to the William Hill App, and the problems reading websites on the mobile phone due to the frequency of the disruption.
Officials at William Hill have responded by saying the pop-up ads are not intentional and were probably caused by a set-up fault with one of their suppliers.
It’s not the first time that William Hill have angered the non-punter members of the public, with issues concerning pop-up ads going back as far as 2002, but to be fair you could say pretty much the same for most of the online betting community.
It’s believed that Android users are also affected, but only those who have purchased apps from the Google Play store.
One dissatisfied surfer vented on Twitter that they would download the app, give it a one star rating and then delete it, whilst others questioned the logic of marketing in this way and who in their right mind would download the app after this experience?
So how do William Hill solve the problem?
Not that easy.
Web developers believe searching for the rogue code is akin to finding a needle in a haystack, as the code moves around different pages to make tracking of it a major problem.
Jem Maidment, a spokesperson for William Hill told the Mirror Online: “For a short period there was an issue which saw some mobile phone users automatically directed to our app in the App Store as well as their intended site.
“This was due to a link wrongly set up by one of our suppliers – this is a common problem on mobile ad content across many industries.
“Once this was identified we acted quickly to rectify the situation. It has now been resolved – we apologise for any inconvenience.”
