Auto insurance provider Esurance just learned a painful and expensive lesson that anyone named Clint could have told them for free: kerning is important. In fact, it's the difference between trying to sell people insurance with a "click," and insurance with a "dick."
In a series of billboards placed around Chicago, Esurance tried to attract new customers with the innocuous tagline, "Cover your home in a click." There was only one problem: from a few hundred feet away, the C and L of the word click seemed to blur together.
Esurance's problem was soon compounded when a Photoshopped image of what the sign could look like from the wrong angle started circulating on Instagram and Twitter.
Esurance quickly realized its mistake and pulled the billboards, tweeting:
Lesson? When you design a billboard, take a few hundred steps back before you start pasting it up all over town.
[h/t Adweek]