In what can only be described as a masterclass in missing the room entirely, Wowcher’s marketing department discovered that referencing a child being attacked by a crocodile is, in fact, not the emotional hook that drives engagement. The discount retailer’s email campaign apparently thought a zoo tragedy was the perfect pivot point to sell discounted vouchers. Because nothing says “buy our deals” like child endangerment.
This is not a bug in corporate marketing strategy. This is the feature. For years, the finance and retail sectors have chased engagement through shock value, betting that outrage shares just as well as joy. Wowcher simply took the logic to its honest conclusion: if sensationalism works, why not sensationalize actual human suffering?
The company apologized, calling it “unacceptable.” They meant it. Not because the tactic was morally bankrupt, but because it failed the real test: it got caught. Had the email landed differently, had the algorithm blessed it, had enough people clicked through before the backlash, Wowcher would be running quarterly reports on its “controversial but effective” campaign.
This is where modern marketing lives now. In the space between “what if we just… didn’t” and “what if we did anyway.” The crocodile attack email is not an outlier. It is what happens when you optimize purely for clicks and treat human attention as a resource to be extracted rather than earned. The only surprising part is that it took an actual predator incident to make the metaphorical predation visible.