David&Goliath Will Probably Not Pay Ransom for Its ‘Hostage’ URL

By Patrick Coffee 

In case you missed it earlier this week, a Dallas-based agency called Slingshot has been playing a limited time prank on David&Goliath. We wouldn’t call it mean-spirited. It’s more … mischievous.

Right now, davidandgoliath.com looks like this:

david angelo

Advertisement

Here’s the first in a series of daily videos from Monday.

The new season of Mr. Robot is kind of uneven, but you have to stick with it until the big reveal! Now, a brief Panda Mask Explainer.

They are really into this, we can tell.

As promised, they’ve released a video every day this week and brought it to David Angelo’s attention via the social media. According to some sources on the inside, uh huh, they want him to donate an unspecified amount to their charitable foundation, or else the website gets it.

THE BACKSTORY: For reasons that are no longer a deeply held secret, the URL davidandgoliath.com never belonged to the agency Angelo launched in 1999.

As we hear it, Slingshot could not secure its own preferred URL when it first opened more than 20 years ago. Since this particular shop’s narrative was all about taking on The Big Guys, its principals went with davidandgoliath.com hoping that slingshot.com could eventually be theirs.

David&Goliath came to be four years later and, according to our extra-secret sources, Angelo has been angling to score that URL ever since. But since slingshot.com was not yet available to facilitate a trade, D&G has had to make do with dng.com for the past 17 years.

That all changed when Slingshot scored their own dot com and proceeded to leverage the existing URL for maximum effectiveness and, possibly, media coverage.

Our colleague Tim Nudd reached out to Angelo before running his Tuesday post, and Angelo hasn’t responded. He did, however, get back to Slingshot via D&G’s Twitter account yesterday:

We agree that love is way better than hate in the long run. But sometimes, in the moment, hate can be kind of fun, says the internet. See: Trump, Donald J.

LOL. A Slingshot spokesperson wrote: “Since Tim’s AdFreak article on Tuesday, we’ve had a great back and forth with David Angelo and his agency through Twitter. Their strategy is to shower us with love. We prefer they shower us with cash.”

This madcap caper will end tomorrow, and we hear that some URLs may change hands in a spectacular display of generosity.

But we feel like maybe Slingshot should distance itself from the Foundation. Not that there’s anything unethical going on there, but when you’re such a publicly visible figure running a national campaign, even the slightest implications of impropriety can be very damaging. Or so we hear that many people are saying.

Advertisement