Superbowl Means SuperURL to Some

Bill Sweetman, General Manager, Domains Portfolio, lives and breathes domain names. In fact, while most people were sitting down to watch either a football game, or the ads between plays this past weekend, Bill pulled out his version of a playbook and made notes on every domain name mentioned in the ads he saw.

For those south of the border (or elsewhere in the world, for that matter). I’ll give you a little insight into how the Canadian television system works: Canadian cable companies are required to substitute the feed from the Canadian network showing the Superbowl (in this case, CTV) over top of the usual cable-delivered American network feed (FOX). The net result is pretty much the exact same coverage as you would see in the U.S., but with different ads. It also means that across the country, Canadians pull out old fashioned rabbit ears in an attempt to pull in the over-the-air broadcast feed from across the border so they can see the “real” Superbowl ads.

Bill opted for the Canadian feed and provided this extensive rundown of the good, the bad and the ugly of Superbowl URLs, with some comments:

The Good:

The Bad:

www.nflcanada.com – What, they couldn’t get NFL.ca? Sheesh!
www.siriuscanada.ca – Doesn’t the .ca make “canada” redundant? sirius.ca would have been so much better…
www.manulifeincomeplus.com – Man that’s a lot to have to type!
www.creditunionsofbc.com – Ditto!
www.cdic.ca – Well, it’s not so much that this one is bad as much as it’s boring.
www.10000bcmovie.com – This one’s just begging to be mistyped! And the studio forgot to register the typo variations like 1000bcmovie.com. Typical.

The Ugly:

www.rogers.com/tellyourstory – Now that’s awkward! Is that “tell yours, Tory” as in John Tory? (he’s a local political candidate, and well-known as a former Rogers executive)
www.rogers.com/windowsmobile – That’s a lot to type…
www.truehd.ca – Great domain name, but inconsistent with this company’s URL strategy (see above)
www.disney.com/narnia – If you already own narnia.com, why use the slash version instead?
www.bcaa.com/tv – Hmmm, do you think they’re measuring their TV spend?
www.ikea.ca/mattress – Yawn…

The MVP:

www.educate.com – Sweet! Guess who owns this killer domain name?

The Sore Loser:

www.nestle-bowlblitz.ca – Not only does this feature “the dash of death” but someone forgot to register the version of the domain without the dash. (Please tell me this wasn’t the work of the agency I used to work at!)

Touchdown!

http://www.isquattedyour.eu/ Michele

Some of the domains registered in .ca are pretty cool, but as usual the cinema studios are doing odd things with their online real estate. It happens over here all the time – and they have even more choices open to them in .ie!

Michele

Superbowl Means SuperURL to Some

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