Free food with a sales pitch.
That’s the idea behind promotions by Sedo and Radix at this year’s SXSW conference in Austin.
Sedo set up a food truck in a downtown area with high foot traffic and is offering free frozen yogurt. People have to order toppings corresponding to a particular domain, such as .sexy sprinkles.
As of last night, this promotion has led to 2,000 conversations about top level domain options.
Just a block away, Radix is promoting its .space top level domain name with branded grilled cheese sandwiches. On the first day, Radix was giving away 100 grilled cheese sandwiches per hour, leading to many more conversations about new domain names.
(I hope to make it to their locations today and will shoot some video.)
SXSW is a great way to meet startups, which are some of the more likely candidates to embrace a domain on something other than .com. .Co has done major promotion at SXSW for years, and people sporting t-shirts with their own .co domain names are now commonplace at SXSW.
Is ordering a vanilla froyo with .sexy sprinkles really a “conversation about top level domain options”? Seems like awareness marketing at best. I don’t see how “delicious frozen treat” even begins to articulate the benefits of new top level domains, unless the message is “Frozen yogurt: it ain’t ice cream, but at least it’s free. Kind of like new TLDs to .com”
They’re talking to each person about TLD options while they’re ordering.
You would be surprised by the number of conversations and the amount of education we provided around new TLDs. The yogurt was simply the gateway, but boy I’ll tell ya, lots of people were talking about “new extensions as alternatives to .com and a sign of the ever-changing internet”! True story.