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:
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