Company starts campaign to build awareness of the availability of alternatives to .com domain names.
Donuts launched its first major, web-based advertising campaign to raise awareness of new top level domain choices yesterday evening.
The “Freedom of Choice” campaign involves display and video advertising targeted to small and medium business owners, entrepreneurs and tech-savvy early adopters. Ads will show on Forbes, Mashable and Fast Company, as well as more general sites such as YouTube and news sites.
Donuts CMO Jeff Davidoff told Domain Name Wire that, because Donuts is the biggest new TLD company, “We definitely feel like we have a responsibility and role in accelerating adoption in this new category.”
The Freedom of Choice campaign will run for a minimum of 60 days. Davidoff declined to disclose the cost, other than to say it’s well over $1 million.
Video ads for the campaign start with .com, which is then “backspaced” out and replaced with a number of new top level domain names. (The ad is embedded below.)
Davidoff said that starting the ads with .com is necessary for people to understand the new domain choices.
“Starting with .com puts them in the right frame of mind for the category,” he said.
Consumers who view the videos aren’t thinking of domain names at the time, and using .com frames the topic for them. Donuts tested a version of the ad without .com at the beginning and it didn’t test as well.
The company is also testing versions of the ad that end with your.domains and www.your.domains to see if the www is necessary for people to understand these are web addresses.
Even if the www proves necessary today, Davidoff thinks that will change quickly. He said that once you visit or type-in a not-com once, you get it.
Although the campaign has been running for less than 24 hours, Davidoff says that early results are promising, including lots of people viewing the full video ads rather than skipping them.
In addition to this general awareness campaign, Donuts will begin highlighting business that are using new top level domain names for their web address.
Here’s the full length video ad for the campaign:
Robbie says
Freedom with a premium price, hardly sounds like Freedom, maybe better to advertise into the launch, not when all the good terms are warehouse, or even better when they release the blocks.
Kenny Williams says
Good commercial, better than anything GoDaddy has ever done.
It still does not matter. New TLDs are doomed to fail.
jane says
some perhaps, but some will flourish
Bret Fausett says
That’s really well done. Kudos to the Donuts team.
Andrew Allemann says
My personal take on the ad is that, without other knowledge, I first would have assumed it was an ad for .com (if I wasn’t aware of new TLDs). The ending obviously shows it’s not, but consumers have to get there first.
JSL says
The blinking “not com” is quite comical
Collin says
The woman holding the flowers in the very beginning was super awkward and I’m not a huge fan of the song, but the ad is otherwise decent. I’m glad Donuts is doing this. Their ad campaign is going to benefit everyone who is connected to the new gTLDs in one way or another.
@Robbie I don’t like Donut’s premium pricing model, either. I have no problem with .club’s business model where they charge a one-time fee and then the domain has a regular renewal price, but Donut’s model of high renewal prices is just plain obnoxious.
I avoid domains with premium renewal prices religiously — I don’t care how nice the domain is. They’re super hard to resell and no one wants to deal with expensive renewal fees.
Rightside screwed me over when I won e.ninja at auction for ~$1,500. I was happy with the price but I guess they weren’t because they tacked on a +$50/yr renewal on top of the regular .ninja renewal price. Honestly +$50/yr isn’t bad especially for a single-character domain but it’s the principal of the situation I care about. If I ever want to sell that domain it’s not going to be fun explaining to the buyer that it has a premium renewal price, and Rightside never said anything about premium renewal prices for the domains on that registry auction. I still feel cheated and it’s not like I can just ask them to waive the higher-than-usual renewal price.
Collin says
principle*
JSL says
Fyi any new gTLD registry can change their pricing as long as they notify registrants sufficiently in advance. Your 50$/yr may well become 10$ or 2000$ in the future.
Collin says
Sigh. Well I wish for the former. I really liked RightSide until this happened.
PoopyDoopyMonster says
Nice. I like it! And after that campaign is over, I can’t wait to see their next ad. But the next one shouldn’t even mention dot com at all.
heather says
These are the ppl who in my opinion are destroying the domain industry.
Plain and simple they have flooded the market with stupid generic extentions that are anything but viable, and in so doing — devalued the .com by atleast 30-40% with their “NEVER ENOUGH” greedy business model.
Not to mention nearly bankrupting several major domain registries and
flooding Icann with 1,000’s of unnecessary trademark lawsuits.
Personally, from now on I am boycotting any site that pitches for these
reckless new extentions, because in reality all they are trying to do is intentionally attempting to kill the .com and .com is the foundation that
made all of everyones success in the domain industry possible.
Domainers need to wise up, when the roof falls in on the domain name
industry because of all the con games I say remember who to blame.
Screw D**nuts! hmmm.. I wonder if maybe they have an extention for that?
PoopyDoopyMonster says
Not all are stupid extensions. Dot club and Dot center are two of my favorites.
Jothan says
Devo was a cool music selection… As a band they have always had a similar polarizing effect as the new TLDs seem to have… Camp 1: 100% get it and love it or Camp 2: 100% ew.
I say, job well done!
Alejandro says
.WasteOfMoney
.WasteOfTime
.GtldsSuck