Check out this Capital One television commercial running during the NCAA tournament (embedded courtesy of iSpot.tv). Listen to NBA legend Charles Barkley when he hollers out a domain name at around the 15 second mark of this commercial:
Sure sounds like he said “AirHorns.com.” If anyone navigated to AirHorns.com after seeing the commercial, they would probably see a SSL certificate error (I did on Chrome). If they were daring enough to ignore the error message, they wouldn’t end up on a website owned by Capital One. AirHorns.com seems to be owned by a company called Grover Products Company. As you might imagine, this company sells air horns.
Adam Strong, CEO and Co-Founder of Evergreen.com noticed this and called out Capital One via Twitter for the domain name confusion they created:
If you try https://t.co/slXzbvtUMh you may like the results even better 🏀 pic.twitter.com/hERFDjhZxy
— Capital One (@CapitalOne) March 22, 2019
Apparently, Capital One bought and uses Air-Hornz.com for its humor website. If you pause the commercial and look at Charles Barkley’s phone, you can see it says Air-Hornz.com in tiny letters for a brief moment. Interestingly, they use Capital.One for a url shortener on Twitter, so they clearly know a bit about domain names.
Hopefully the company that owns AirHorns.com fixes that SSL error and Capital-izes on the confusion.
