Blacksheep David takes on Google Goliath armed only with LED
Claiming that a Google glitch had cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential revenue, direct-to-factory eyewear startup Blacksheep, paraded 25 billboard trucks outside Google’s New York HQ offices proclaiming the message ‘Shame on you Google’ to help get their point across.
Blacksheep Founder and CEO Pierre Wizman, says: “We chose LED screens on wheels because DOOH is unskippable, uncuttable, and 100% real. Google erased our organic presence on web browsers, so we used mobile digital screens to bring the truth directly to their doorstep. If Google refuses to be transparent on their digital screens, we will be hyper-transparent on ours – right outside their office windows.”
The protest comes on the heels of Blacksheep’s appearance on NBC’s Today Show a few weeks earlier. In the segment a reporter compared high-end prescription glasses, running about $350, with Blacksheep’s $8 factory-direct eyewear and how lab results revealed Blacksheep’s glasses outperformed the luxury pairs when it came to optical precision and quality. After the segment Blacksheep believes there was a huge surge in search traffic related to their eyewear, but that a Google organic search algorithm redirected the organic traffic to a dead-end 404 error page, with the search anomaly disabling Blacksheep’s organic listing, ultimately leading to what Blacksheep claims was ‘an estimated USD$100,000+ capital drain in just 24 hours…money effectively paid directly to Google to recover traffic Google had misplaced’.
When Blacksheep confronted Google with verified Google Search Console data documenting the platform failure, Google repeatedly stated its systems had operated correctly and, according to Blacksheep, ‘have refused to issue advertising credits or provide a technical explanation for the organic failure’.
Wizman adds: “In the digital world, Google controls the screen, the algorithm, and the narrative: online, when they make your website disappear, you are powerless and invisible. But in the physical world, there are no algorithmic ‘glitches,’ no automated walls, and no ad-blockers. You can’t shadow ban a 20-foot mobile LED billboard parked outside your corporate headquarters.”
Blacksheep is currently preparing formal legal action against Google.
