OK! magazine broke the story heard ’round the world: Britney’s 16-year-old little sister is pregnant. Thing is, OK! chose to break it online.
Yes, every outlet eventually picked up the nut graf, showed the same Nickelodeon clips and set stills. But OK! magazine was cited each and every time as the organization to get the get.
The publisher trumpeted the scoop with an exclamation point-filled message to advertisers, and boasted of its celeb news primacy, according to Dylan Stableford at Folio.
It was obnoxious, maybe, but in the hypercompetitive world of celebrity news, perfectly justified.
The two things they got wrong? Nowhere in the message did the publisher talk about the online advertising opportunity. And, according to Stableford, OK! forgot to buy Google keywords:
“It also appears that People.com bought ‘OK magazine’ as a Google keyword, displaying a link under search results that reads “JAMIE SPEARS PREGNANT.”
To top it off? Ironically, the publisher’s message was sent by email.