Abbott Labs registers over 500 domains for AbbVie spinoff, hand registers brand domain

Abbott Labs paid the normal registration fee for its new brand domain, but gets defensive with hundreds of registrations.

How much did Abbott Labs, a $95 billion market cap company, pay to get the domain name for its spinoff pharmaceuticals unit? About $10.

The company was able to freely register AbbVie.com on February 28. So it paid whatever CSC charges for a standard domain registration. This is unusual — large companies usually have to buy existing domains for new brands because they’re already registered. (In this case it may be because the name is so bad.)

Yet the company has spent thousands of dollars on protecting this new brand in cyberspace through additional registrations.

Last month I wrote about how Abbott Labs was taking precautionary measures with domain names for Richard Gonzalez, who is going to be the CEO of the company’s pharmaceuticals unit.

Now the company is going hog wild with domain registration since it has a name for the new unit — AbbVie.

The company registered over 500 domain names yesterday through brand protection company MarkMonitor. Most of them appear defensive in nature.

They registered lots of typos, such as SbbVie.com (a is next to s on the keyboard), abbfe.com, and abviy.com.

They also registered lots of pharma topics such as OneAbbvieOncology.com and AbbviePap.com.

A venture unit? They’ve got AbbvieVentures.com. Careers? AbbVieExecutiveJobs.com.

Of course they got the obligatory AbbvieSucks.com. But how’s this for foresight on defensive registrations? RecallAbbVie.com. Nice.

Sadly, even with these 500 domains there are still many more that someone could register that include the company’s brand. So I’m not sure if maybe this was a little overboard.