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Donuts launches first “not com” ad campaign

Kevin Murphy, March 17, 2015, 13:54:05 (UTC), Domain Registries

Donuts has launched its first ad campaign, part of its plan to raise awareness about new gTLDs as a category.
It’s a digital-only video campaign, expected to run on sites including YouTube, the New York Times, Forbes, Mashable and Fast Company.

The theme is “freedom of choice”, using the slogan “Welcome to the not com revolution”.
“It’s going to be a lot of digital, a lot of online marketing, and it’s going to be about choice and the fact that this new product category represents an opportunity to grab an identity on the internet, that really reflects what it is you are and what you do,” COO Richard Tindal told DI in a recent interview.
The ad campaign going to be US-only, which chimes with what Tindal said as he laid out some of Donuts’ vision and marketing plans for 2015.
“I think that level of awareness is very low at sort of five to ten percent,” he said in the January interview. “It varies from country to country. Probably in the US it is even a little lower than other places.”
Tindal told us that Donuts is primarily concerned with marketing the “category” of new gTLDs, rather than any specific TLD.
“Our mission in 2015 is to have those people be aware of the category before they turn up at the registrar,” he said. “They are still going to get the story from the registrar, but we want them to know all about this new thing before they turn up.”
Donuts says that the new ad campaign will drive traffic to Your.domains.
That domain actually redirects to Domainr — a sparse, but quite smart, name-spinner app developed by the little-known nb.io.

That site, which appears to be monetized with affiliate links, quickly presents relevant domains based on user keywords and sends leads to a selection of registrars.
Such “smart search” is an important part of Donuts’ strategy, but one where the new gTLD industry as a whole is failing to make much of an impact at the moment.
Here in the UK, it’s pretty obvious from Go Daddy’s advertising that the market-leading registrar would sooner take the Verisign shilling and plug .com rather than risk promoting the largest expansion of inventory in its history.
Tindal said in our interview that Donuts’ aim in 2015 is to promote smart search over paid placement.
Asked whether registrars’ economic interests are aligned with new gTLD registries’, he said he’s convinced that for all the domains sold in 2014, new gTLDs have better metrics for registrars than .com. The only problem is volume.

If you look at the metrics of those .com names, under every criteria the registrar is better off selling one of ours.
The customer finds a name more quickly. It’s got more margin for the registrar, because they’re better quality names. They’re going to buy more. The problem, as you’ve just noted is of course just the volume. At the moment, there’s so much volume for them in .com that they tend to stick to that, and so we’re seeing the sort of behaviors, if you like, that are sort of clouding what we would like to see.

Awareness-raising is important, therefore, to get customers actively looking for more relevant domains, rather than being served up .com by default at registrars unwilling to take a risk on new TLDs.
Donuts’ announcement can be found here.
The full interview with Tindal, which also covers topics such as SEO and dot-brands, can be read by DI PRO subscribers here.

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Comments (2)

  1. Not-Com Tom says:
    March 17, 2015 at 2:44 pm

    All players in the gTLD arena should be thanking Donuts inc for this effort which, in addition to educating buyers of domains, also begins the deprogramming of the entrenched .com mindset among consumers in the U.S.
    Personally I couldn’t be more pleased with their choice of category name.
    Thank You Donuts, and Good Luck!

    Reply
  2. Donuts Inc. says:
    March 19, 2015 at 7:19 pm

    Just to clarify, the DomainR service returns results for all TLDs, not just the ones Donuts administers.

    Reply

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