Mobile communications firm Orange launched an ad campaign in the UK this month.
The ad campaign (TV, outdoor and print) focuses on the theme of “I am”, as in I am who I am because of everyone. You can see the ads I am talking about on this description of the campaign, here.
There are billboards all over the UK advertising Orange and urging people to “search online for “I am” “, instead of asking them to visit Orange’s website at Orange.com.(In fact the website is not mentioned at all).
This form of navigation is fairly new. I call it ’search phrase navigation’. It has important implications for the use of domain names in marketing, which I touch on later in this article. Now, I have covered this topic on this blog in May this year and at the time speculated about the threat this form of marketing held for domain names. In that article -’Keywords are back and this time its serious‘ - I wrote about a few Japanese firms that were using this form of search phrase navigation, however, this is the first time I have seen it in the UK.
The way it works is that a company chooses a phrase, not necessarily one that that relates directly to their business, and builds a marketing campaign around the phrase. The company website is then optimized so that it ranks well in search engines for that phrase. Customers are urged to enter the phrase in the search box of their favourite search engine, instead of the URL of the company website. If all goes well a search using this phrase will then bring up a list of websites with the company site at the top.
With this form of navigation you don’t need a memorable or category killing domain name. (You only need a memorable phrase.) In the case of Orange your search takes you to a very ordinary sounding – www.i-am-everyone.co.uk.
The lack of reasonably priced generic domain names is encouraging companies to look for other ways of getting their message out there. While generic domains rule the address bar they don’t necessarily rule when it comes to searching.
Having said all this, generic domain name holders do not need to give up, quite yet. I understand that, at the time of writing, if you type in the phrase “I am” into Google, Orange does not appear in the first page of Google’s natural search results - yet!
