Published in News

Seattle paid $17,500 to improve CEO’s Internet reputation

by on14 July 2014



Wants its money back

Seattle’s publicly-owned electrical outfit, City Light wants the $17,500 that it paid to Brand.com in a botched effort to boost the internet image of its CEO Jorge Carrasco.

According to Ars Technica the CEO’s chief of staff, Sephir Hamilton said that the agency may even file a lawsuit to enforce its refund.

"We're leaving our options open,” he said. “I hope that they'll see that what we signed up for was not the service that they delivered. We were sold one bill of goods and we were given another.”

What they were paying for was for a 2008 Seattle Weekly story critical of Carrasco to be buried.

The piece said that he was "a short, slight Texan, Carrasco has brought a certain kind of cowboy justice to City Light, unsurprising, perhaps, from someone who earned the nickname 'Jorge Fiasco' while city manager in Austin, Texas, the first of three jobs he was ousted from before landing here."

The group paid Brand.com which “enhances online branding and clears negatives by blanketing search results with positive content" to counteract unwanted search engine results. It would have cost City Light $47,500 for the service but the contract spent $17,500 before the electricity company gave up.

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