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Herman Cain's Web Team Uses '404 Not Found' Page As Opportunity To Brand Obama's Policies as Road To Nowhere

BY Sarah Lai Stirland | Tuesday, November 15 2011

Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain can often appear indecisive when trying to articulate his thoughts about the role that Muslims should play in our society, or on President Obama's policy toward Libya, but when he makes up his mind, his web team is there to efficiently usher you in the right direction if you get lost on the candidate's website.

"Like an Obama policy, this 404 page gets you nowhere," the Cain campaign bluntly tells web surfers when they hit a broken link on Cain's web site. "But try your search again and maybe you'll come across some Common Sense Solutions. Or try one of these links: Home; 999; The Issues; Meet Herman; Multimedia; Newsroom."

Custom 404 pages are well-used Easter eggs, left behind by developers on many websites over the years to entertain visitors who lose their way. For many brands, this makes sense: after all, the Internet — built by the people who made "418 I'm a teapot" an honest-to-goodness, legitimate error message as an April Fool's gag — rewards humor. So which other candidates are trying to ride geeky in-jokes all the way to the White House?

It turns out that Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, and Newt Gingrich all host traditional, end-of-the-line 404 Not Found kind of pages.

Ron Paul's campaign places a search box right on the error page so that users can immediately try again to find what they're looking for. Michele Bachmann's page tries to steer people towards giving money or signing up for her email list. Jon Huntsman's campaign simply serves up his homepage to anyone looking for something at an URL his team hadn't anticipated.

Only former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's team seems to be running parallel to the Cain Train where humor is concerned. Attempts to reach URLs that don't exist at mittromney.com will yield this image of a kicking donkey:

Because the only reason you'd find yourself face to face with the mascot of the Democratic Party is if something had gone terribly awry. Get it?

With Nick Judd

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