Sheer genius. Presumably it wasn’t planned, but this is almost priceless good advertising for Dominos Pizza – nice one.

The story in short – a guy buys a pizza from his local Dominos in Newport, and the person who processes his payment from his bank card mistakenly adds too many digits which ends up in a  whopping £179,932.32 being actually taken from his bank account and sending him into serious overdraft. It appears to be an error on both parts – the pizza-person who tapped in the wrong digits, but then his own bank who actually authorised such a huge amount of money from his account. In actual fact that can be to Dominos benefit, after all these things can happen and the banks should have the final fail-safe procedure to stop this happening. All is sorted though, and the Newport pizza-eater is given £100 compensation.

What struck me about this though is when I turned on my HTC work mobile phone one morning last week. It’s set up to show snippets of news items on the main screen, which to be honest I never look at. But this caught my eye, firstly from the bright Dominos logos standing out, and then the killer headline about such a crazy amount being charged to this poor guy in Newport. It was enough to make me stop and open up the news article and see what it was all about – completely intriguing.

What then struck me is how many other people would have done the same, many thousands, possibly even millions. Spotting the nice images, the catchy headline, being intrigued and finding out more. Fantastic brand awareness for Dominos pizza which would cost a fortune otherwise to establish big-name companies in people’s sight, whether adverts at football games (e.g. world cup), or logos pasted everywhere. Even bad publicity in most cases can be good, by simply getting the name out there – but with this situation even better when they’re only partially to blame with it boiling down to human error that has been nicely sorted rather than the actual ‘company’ operating badly.

Ok, so here’s a few lessons to learn I think:

1. Look for good publicity angles like this, and get someone who knows what they’re doing to milk it for your business. It will need the right angle and presentation, and just the right controversial angle to get noticed.

2. If ever you’re at the receiving end of such advertising then be careful what you say. Ideally say nothing, and run pasty PR people to gauge it right.

3. Re-use the original piece for further attention, particularly to your clients, database list, social media followers, colleagues/employees. Again, milk it.