The Big Screen and Your Computer Screen: New gTLDS could boost Hollywood movie promotion/marketing
April 18, 2013
By jbourne
This past weekend I took my children to see DreamWorks’ The Croods and among the endless previews I focused my domain name radar on an ad for the upcoming sequel to Despicable Me and its advertised URL, Despicable.me.
It got me to thinking that soon, businesses of all kinds will be able to experiment with domain names in over 500 open new gTLDs (think Hunger.Games, Mr.Mom, Iron.Man, you get the idea).
Some studios have used top level country codes to create promotional websites that reflect the movie title. For example, Universal Studios registered “despicable” in Montenegro’s .ME when promoting Despicable Me in 2010. Universal Pictures still using the domain Despicable.me, where you can find trailers for the sequel.
Of course, not every movie title is so well suited to available extensions. Two years ago, FairWinds Partners looked at how film studios and their distribution partners use domain names to promote movies. Our study found there was little consistency or convention. Among others, we examined the nominees for the Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as the highest grossing movie for each year from 2000 to 2010. In total, only ten of the 72 movies in the study, or about 14 percent, advertised a Title.com address in promotional materials. The most commonly used alternative was TitleMovie.com. Several studios used the domain name of the production company that made the movie, rather than a domain that included the movie title in some form.
With the launch of about 550 open, generic new .WORDS starting in 2013, studios are presented with enormous creative promotional possibilities. Pairing the list of applications with the list of upcoming movie launches, we could see domain names such as TheBig.Wedding, or Sin.City that could be a site for the original Sin City movie and promote the sequel: Sin City: A Dame to Kill For. How cool would it be to see an action flick title ending in .NINJA, or a nature film with a domain ending in .ECO? If the .MOVIE and .FILM applications move forward, there is no limit to what the tech-savvy studios could do.
