The .Club Registry posted the keynote speech given by Jeff Sass at DomainFest. Sass is the Chief Marketing Officer for the .Club Registry, and the topic of his keynote was “Why Brands are the Key to Your gTLD Success.” For those of you who couldn’t attend the conference, I thought you might find this interesting, especially if you are interested in marketing.
In case you are wondering, it does not come off as a sales pitch, and I found it to be interesting. At the very least, it gives you some insight from someone who is very active in the new gTLD domain name space. If you have any follow up questions after watching the keynote, I will try to get in touch with Mr. Sass and ask him to respond.
I am still hoping the Gary Vaynerchuk keynote is uploaded, and if I find it, I will share it with you.
Elliot, Gary offered the keynote at the Inc. 500 back in 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcqCAqZtedI
Worth watching and still very relevant.
Thanks… I am particularly interested in hearing him speak about domain names.
Thanks for posting this Elliot, and of course I’d be happy to answer any questions you or your readers may have. Any feedback on the presentation is always welcome. We are all learning as we go with the new TLD program. 🙂 Thanks again.
-Jeff Sass, .CLUB Domains
Thanks Elliot & Jeff for the video clip. It’s really helpful for those of us who could not attend the conference. Much appreciated.
Jeff, I’m with you on the deep links business model. However, what’s your view on the possibility of .brand actually replacing .com as the center in that model. So now you have the freedom to add any domain name to the extension you own, eg runningshoes.nike, JustDoIt.Nike, etc without having to try so hard to obtain domain names from other extensions.
I really like to hear your view on .brand vs .com too.
Thanks Kassey,
You are right that the brand applicants have a lot of flexibility to do things with their name to the right of the dot. A lot will depend on what their individual strategies are with their domain. A smart brand like Nike will likely want to have both names covered (i.e. Golf.Nike and Nike.golf) as the latter is more semantically correct and might get “type in traffic” as consumers still adjust to the new naming possibilities. Also, there are a relatively few number of brands that have actually applied for their own extensions at this point, so while for a Nike they might lean toward .Nike over .com, there are thousands of brands where .brand is not an option at this time. They did not apply. One thing is for sure… it will be interesting to see how it all unfolds when brands start actively using new extensions.
Insightful and thought-provoking Jeff – many thanks. And thanks Elliot for posting here.
Paul Mc.
Thank you Paul!
Great presentation Jeff.
Savvy digital marketers will have a new palette on which to paint with clear, concise memorable destinations for product promotion, sale and servicing.
The notion of the semantic web is a winner with names like brand.club that provide a destination that truly represents the key message of a campaign or service promotion. In combination, brands who applied for their own proprietary registry have a distinct advantage over competitors. With their .brand as an anchor, these brands have a massive differentiation opportunity to execute innovative re-branding, marketing, selling and servicing use cases that support their business objective. Exciting time for digital marketers to rethink and differentiate.
Thanks Peter. Exciting times indeed. 🙂