First of all, it dawned on me that most of our children will grow up in a time when the sound of a modem connecting will be both strange and unrecognizable (come to think of it, the last time I dialed up to the Internet was well over a year ago.) It’s not just the sound that will be strange; but also knowing that our kids will grow up in a time where the Web is always on; in a wireless, high-speed, networked environment.
So file away the “log on” and modem noise into the archives. What else have we lost along the way? Well, there’s the http:// and in some cases, even the www.
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Many URL calls-to-action are now represented by only the dot com (and let us not forget what happened to them), but I wonder for how much longer this will be the case. Surely, as long as there’s a .net, .org, .tv and .com, there will be a need to distinguish. However, I’m pretty sure that major brands won’t be in a position where they are sharing suffixes with other players.
Let’s recap: Log on to our website at http://www.website.com (with modem sound) became www.website.com, which in turn shed its three w’s. That left us with website.com, with the potential to become just plain website.
However our story doesn’t end there (even though it should) largely because of… well… us! Marketers just love to measure, don’t they? Enter the slash. Suddenly the simple website.com grows ugly tentacles and becomes website.com/slash, website.com/tv, website.com/newcampaign and the list goes on.
This is not an optimal solution for two reasons. Firstly, the consumer knows better and secondly, there is bound to be traffic loss due to overcomplicated addresses and plain memory loss. One possible solution is to create a unique url specific to the assignment at hand.
This has been done plenty of times in the past. Areyouunbreakable? This generally works better for one-time projects like movies, as opposed to longer term branding initiatives (will bmwfilms.com still be around in a year’s time?) Another solution is perhaps the simplest one – stick with the homepage as the singular point of entry and customize it relative to the concurrent campaign. Unfortunately, this hasn’t worked all that well in the past, mainly due to various internal church-state conflicts and those pesky measuring-marketers again.
A third scenario is what I call, branding the slash. Unless you’re an uberbrand, don’t try this at home. Anyone been to Nike.com lately? Probably not. But I’ll bet you’ve been to nike.com/play or nike.com/whatever. They’ve successfully branded the slash and done it in a credible way. Sure they’re able to measure the success of each of these initiatives, partly by dedicating a fair amount of integrated dollars behind marketing each destination slash, and partly due to their reputation for creating online real estate which more than rewards visitors for their time and effort.
So using my simple is better thought, might we see a Nike commercial which just reads, /PLAY or better still, PLAY. I think so. I think they – and other brands – will succeed in building the kind of rapport with their customers which will result in the http://www.nike.com becoming somewhat unnecessary (after all, they were one of the first brands – if not the first – to drop their printed name and tagline, letting their swoosh do all the talking).
URL innovation and evolution is not the best solution for many brands, however it might very well help differentiate one URL or online brand from another. It certainly could help associate a degree of freshness to a call-to-action which – these days – needs a lot more momentum than ever before to result in a visit.
- Joseph Jaffe is Director of Interactive Media at TBWA\Chiat\Day in New York, where he works with clients including Kmart, ABSOLUT Vodka, New York City Public Schools, Embassy Suites and Sci-Fi. His primary focus is to highlight interactive's value and benefit in meeting his clients' integrated business and branding objectives.