6 Agencies Plan Toyota’s Tagline; What About Their New gTLD?

Posted on September 17, 2012 by Joe Alagna

The Importance of Business Naming – Toyota Introduces ‘Let’s Go Places’

Toyota Creates a New TaglineThe article didn’t state how much, but I suspect that Toyota spent millions of dollars coming up with their new tagline, “Let’s Go Places”. I’m sure they had focus groups, internal meetings, external meetings, collaborations, and studies galore. If you look at the comments below the article making this announcement (link shown below), it appears that many readers think it’s not worth it.

My view is that it is worth it. Business naming is at the very foundation of advertising and promotion.  The lack of planning on behalf of most companies introducing products and new services is surprising. There is an example here… I’m still surprised that in spite of spending millions of dollars coming up with a tag line designed to ring well with hundreds of millions of consumers for the next several years, no one thought of buying the matching domain name (letsgoplaces.com). This domain seems to be registered by a defunct travel agency (at least that was what I was able to determine in a time limited space; I don’t care to spend too much time on this). You’da thunk that they would have researched that since they will likely spend many millions more making that phrase famous. I’m sure they could have bought it for as much as they spent on the ad agencies (or likely, much less).

(NOTE/UPDATE 2013… It appears that Toyota now does control the URL, LetsGoPlaces.com. As of October, 2012 that the domain was taken over by Toyota.  There are no reports of the sale / transfer being public.  Hopefully for Toyota, they made this deal before they made the announcement that they spent 6 million dollars coming up with the campaign.  There certainly was no indication that they did when I wrote this article.)

On the other hand, Toyota IS applying for their own new gTLD, .toyota.

So, if they want to, starting next year, they can begin advertising this new tagline as:

“LetsGoPlaces.Toyota”   (They wouldn’t need the .com version as badly then and certainly wouldn’t want to advertise it once they own .Toyota).

If they do that, they’ll be taking advantage of the new Internet paradigm, where big brands will no longer make .com famous and valuable.  That doesn’t mean that .com will lose value right away (or maybe they will; no one can predict this).  But at least brand advertising dollars will be focused on their own brands, not brands that end in .com. And that will be good for brands and trademarks.

Or, if they want to, in addition to their new customized tagline domain, they can create a forwarding sub-domain like:

“LetsGoPlaces.Toyota.com”    (forwarded to their new gTLD domain, “letsgoplaces.toyota”).

It’s going to be fun to see how this plays out. Maybe they’re already planning their new gTLD strategy! Here’s the article about their new tagline:

Toyota Introduces ‘Let’s Go Places’

The Toyota brand is changing its U.S. advertising tagline to “Let’s Go Places,” replacing “Moving Forward,” its slogan since 2004, Automotive News reports.

“It is energetic, aspirational, inclusive and very versatile,” Bill Fay, Toyota Division general manager, said in a statement…

Toyota worked with advertising partners Saatchi & Saatchi, Dentsu America, Conill, Burrell, Intertrend and Grieco Research to create the tagline.

Read the story… | Source: Ad Age | Date posted: 9/17/2012

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Four New gTLD Applications Withdrawn

Posted on September 7, 2012 by Joe Alagna

Doug Isenberg reported on four new gTLD applications that have been withdrawn. Three of them were applied for by Google. I can see why they changed their mind; they don’t really seem sensible for use as a top level domain. There may be other reasons but .are, .and, and .est struck me as not really useful right from the start. I think they made a good decision in these cases.

Here Are the First Four New gTLD Applications That Have Been Withdrawn

Nearly one month after ICANN announced that three of the new gTLD applications had been withdrawn (and on the eve of a webinar on the “Application Evaluation Progress”), ICANN’s online database finally has been updated – to show that four applications have been withdrawn.

They are: .and, .are, .est and .ksb.

Interestingly, the first three of these listed above were all applied…

Read the story… | Source: Isenberg on Domains | Date posted: 9/7/2012

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Big Investors Bullish on Domain Names

Posted on September 5, 2012 by Joe Alagna

Stephen Mandel, Lone Pine CapitalI just read an article about Billionaire, Stephen Mandel buying stock in Verisign. Considering that Verisign has continually focused deeper into the domain name business, this is good news for our industry. Lone Pine reflects “big money” thinking and it’s nice to see these kinds of investors bet on domains. This kind of thing bodes well for all registries [ 🙂 ]. Here’s the article reference:

Billionaire Stephen Mandel Bought In To Verisign

Lone Pine Capital has recently filed a 13G with the SEC to announce that it has acquired 8.6 million shares of Verisign Inc (NASDAQ:VRSN), the Internet registry service that includes .com domain names. Based on the company’s share count, Lone Pine owns 5.5% of the shares outstanding… His investments have tended to significantly outperform the S&P 500.

Mandel isn’t the only hedge fund manager to take an interest in Verisign…at the end of June John Griffin’s Blue Ridge Capital reported a position of 6.2 million shares. Griffin was legendary investor Julian Robertson’s second in command before founding Blue Ridge in 1996…

Read the story… | Source: InsideMonkey.com | Date posted: 9/5/2012

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A Dotless Domain Name? Why?

Posted on August 25, 2012 by Joe Alagna

ICANN Security and Stability Advisory CommitteeI ran across a report today put out by ICANN’s Security and Stability Advisory Committee (SSAC). The report is SSAC’s Report on Dotless Domains. In this report, the SSAC stated that dotless domains would not be universally reachable and the SSAC recommended strongly against their use. I couldn’t agree more but my reason for agreeing is not even mentioned in the report.

The SSAC looked at this idea from a technical standpoint. The idea was brought up because of the new gTLD process. A lot of new players in the domain name space began asking why we couldn’t just build domain names without a dot. The report answers many technical reasons why this isn’t feasible today but I’d like to bring up what I think is a more important reason.

The Difference Between The Virtual and Real World

Let’s pretend that technicians figure out a way to make a dotless URL work. I’m sure there is some way to make this possible. Maybe one day they actually will! But the more important question is “Why Should they?” I can think of no practical reason. Dots “.” are a handy way to express the difference between “The Real” and “The Virtual”

Just think about a world where there are no dots. If you said to your friend, “I’m going to Chicago,” he’d have to ask you the clarifying question, “Do you mean Chicago online or the real Chicago?” This simple point is why the question of eliminating dots “.” is silly. The dot doesn’t just play a role in the technology, it plays an important role in everyday communications. I can’t think of a better way to express a virtual location without having to clarify it every time one expresses their intent.

It’s the equivalent of buying a lousy domain name like “NuKarz4U.com.” Think about it. If you sold new cars and had this domain and wanted to run a radio ad, you’d have to spell out and explain that domain name over and over every time you ran an ad. It would go like this:

“Just come and visit New Cars For You.com! That’s spelled N-U-K-A-R-Z-The-Number-four-and-the-letter-U.com. It’s not N-E-W but N-U and not a C but a K and not an S but a Z…”

You get the point.

Eliminating the dot would add further necessary explanation to millions of discussions, around the world, both written and spoken. I suppose that we could go back to always using “www” or “http://” but neither of those do what a single dot “.” (or two) does so eloquently. Let’s not try to fix something that’s not broken.  Thankfully SSAC’s recommendation is right on.  The idea of dotless domain names is a bad one.

Read the report and comments… | Source: ICANN | Date posted: 8/25/2012

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