Money hungry Wiggles

Posted by stuart as

I would imagine that “Wiggles inc”, their subsidiaries, promoters, distributors and retailers probably have a couple of grand of my and Mrs. Pimpmypagerank’s hard earned.

A couple of months ago Mrs Pimpmypagerank took PMPR Jr to see a Wiggles concert. She dutifully lined up at the merchandise stands and bought him a (admittedly, pretty cool) tshirt.

On the left sleeve of said tshirt is a web address. I hadn’t really taken too much notice of the address, assuming it pointed to www.thewiggles.com.au, a quite cool interactive website for kids.
But no, I actually forked out my reddies to advertise the wiggles online store - www.wigglesshop.com.

This pisses me off. The wiggles are using my kid to not further their brand by pointing people to their website, but using him to advertise their (purely commercial) online shop.

I’m not sure why this pisses me off so much, but I did do some more investigating. The wiggles website actually consists of three domains:

1. www.thewiggles.com.au - A quite well done Flash site, with lots of games and activities for the little ‘uns.
2. www.wigglesshop.com - the online merchandise store
3. www.thewigglesondemand.com - more paid stuff - basically you can buy music and video for download here.

The problem is, especially for a three year old, it’s not immediately apparent which site you are on, as they all link to each other.

A couple of times PMPR Jr. has ended up on the “on demand” site, and asked me to “make this song work”. When I’ve looked, I’ve worked out that I need to enter credit card details to get the song to play.

I’m buggered if I’m going to enter the details. I can only imagine the shock we’d get if the site cookied an account for me (so nice of them!), then charged any songs mt kid managed to play to my VISA.

….wanders off to kick the cat