On August 16, 2004, Canadian Ron Bensimhon had broken into the Olympics. He wasn’t actually on the Canadian swim team. When Rom jumped off the springboard, he wasn’t naked, but he wasn’t wearing swim trunks either. He wore a blue tutu and white polka dot tights. And emblazoned across his chest was the name of an Internet casino, GoldenPalace.com.

Millions of people were watching, and the story got picked up by news outlets around the world. It also got huger amount of word-of-mouth chatter. Someone crashing the Olympics and diving into a pool in a tutu? What a story. Pretty remarkable. […]

What they didn’t talk about was GoldenPalace.com. Why?

The stunt had nothing to do with the product it was trying to promote.

So people talked about the remarkable story but left the casino out because ti was irrelevant. They might have mentioned that Bensimhon was sponsored by someone but din’t mentioned the casino either because it was so irrelevant that they forgot, or because it didn’t make the story any better.

It’s like building a magnificent Trojan Horse but forgetting to put anything inside.

-Contagious, p.195