As a small business owner, not getting paid by one of your accounts doesn’t merely suck but can also put you out of business. I can understand their frustration but I can never see resorting to calling people out publicly. No doubt this relationship has bee strained but this isn’t going to make it any better…ever.

I do understand the agency has every right to deny service for non payment. That is a basic tenet of law.

I also understand that shame is a great motivation. By calling out the individuals they did shame them and given the site is back up, apparently they received their money rather quickly.

Yet they also managed to earn themselves a few enemies for life! Bad move. If anything they should have shut the site down WITHOUT the inflammatory text. That would have gotten the job done without defamation or injury and likely they would have received their fees just as quickly.

My two cents.

Could this have been a hack? Or did they really not pay for a year?

Well, I just did a tracert and it resolves to the host http://www.equaljusticeworks.com which according to Whois directory is registered to:
Perkins Coie, LLP
Perkins Coie, LLP Attn: Domain Administrator
1201 Third Avenue
40th Floor
Seattle, WA 98101-3029
US

It looks like the tactic worked; the web site seems to be back up.

I’m actually rather surprised that a company the size of Zenith does not manage its Web site in-house. It’s actually a pretty poor site. The “Latest News” is a four-year-old press release and all the other news channels have no content whatsoever. And is it really possible that they only have two job openings?

Interesting tactic. On the one hand, it seems to have worked. OTOH, they’ve probably lost any follow-on contract work with LG AND given themselves a rather nasty reputation to pretty much any future customer who might take a look at them.

Would I have taken their site down in their position? Probably, or created a “this site is down until further notice due to technical difficulties” page. Would I have put the names of the offending corporate lazy-a$$es who are too cheap to pay their bills? Absolutely not. That’s the rub.

It’s back down again w/ the same message…

I prefer taking the site offline but not saying that it was done so for non-payment. Something like:
“We’re sorry for the inconvenience but this site is temporarily off line. If you are the owner or administrator of this website please contact sitedown@thedomainnameofthesiteoffline.com”

I think it hurts everyone involved if you name names and make allegations. It looks spiteful and unprofessional (and even if you don’t sign your name people can find you if they want to badly enough.)

Bold move. I wonder what their contract says about ownership of the site, control of the domain and approval of any changes to content. I smell legal action.

Questions.

1) Is this cool? No, this was just a last possible measure.

2) If you’re a small PR firm/shop/agency, how do you deal with non-payment? I guess, you know the drill. Try not to pay your bills for a year. This was all in the contract.

3) Does this help or hurt the agency who’s doing this? It helped.

4) Does making specific named allegations help or hurt the people named, or is it more dangerous to the agency, as well? At this time we do not give a sh..t. We have tried all other possible options. That one worked.

5) Does anyone notice that there’s no mention of the agency that built this in the first place? We have not created (or managed) the site, we just hosted it at our facilities.

Personally I do not like when 40000 people and multi-billion dollars company is trying to screw 10 people company, since our survival depends on every pay check we are receiving. We are not hackers, we are tech guys who are trying to make a honest living. We used to be official vendors for many years. LG should be thankful, we have not disabled other LG web assets we are controlling. We have nothing much to loose, LG does, but I do not think our actions hurt reputation of LG much, it is not that great anyway.