If you have been watching the 2014 World Cup matches in Brazil, you have likely seen the McDonalds advertisement the company has been running on the pitch sideboards. McDonalds is directing viewers to a special World Cup website found on a subdomain of its website: Gol.mcd.com.
When I first saw this campaign, my initial thought was “I wonder if they bought golmcd.com” to avoid losing traffic to this possible typo. They did not, and it appears that someone else bought it on June 2.
I was on Twitter yesterday, when I read Christopher Hofman’s tweet. Because McDonald’s applied for the .MCD gTLD extension, it may have been possible for McDonalds to use gol.mcd for this advertisement had it been available. Here’s the tweet I am referencing:
Better dot brand time planning by #McDonalds and they could have used gol.mcd instead of the sub domain http://t.co/Es1L3OZwBW at the WC
— Christopher Hofman (@HofmanLaursen) June 19, 2014
In my opinion, and as I mentioned on Twitter in response to Hofman, I think it would have been confusing to viewers, and they may have thought about it in the same way people likely think about Booking.Yeah. My guess would have been that most would have no idea Gol.mcd is a url, and the website would have had a smaller viewership.
On the other hand, I think McDonalds’ campaign would have been the focus of additional news articles had it used the .MCD extension in an advertisement. I believe mainstream news outlets, especially marketing and advertising outlets, would have picked up on the story and written about this campaign. I don’t know how long this would have been in the news, and I wouldn’t speculate about whether the additional press would help overcome any traffic lossage due to confusion about the extension, but it would have gotten people talking about it.
What do you think would have been the result had McDonalds been able to use Gol.MCD rather than Gol.mcd.com?
It would been a wise decision to use gol.mcd for the commercial since I don’t think too many people are actually going to gol.mcd.com anyway. They obviously bought the extension to use it for marketing purposes in the future and what better time or opportunity to use it other than the world cup.
Unfortunately for them, .MCD does not exist yet. It would have been interesting to see the choice if it was available to them.
Well, then what other choice did they have? Anyway, I am almost certain that they will use it during the next world cup.
Not sure – I suppose they could have used another domain name or mcd.com/gol.
I agree with you about the next World Cup, and most likely sooner.
I wrote about this very phenomenon on LinkedIn. My personal opinion is that Mcdonalds believe the world is ready to acknowledge domain names as such simply by the separation of two (or in this case three) words with a dot. Of course the .com component is a hint for most(!), but to me this is another major step in the evolution of how we navigate the Internet.
If they had been ready with .mcd for the World Cup, they could advertise it with the www in front (www.gol.mcd) to make it easier for the public to understand the new extension
I agree Chris, presenting the www initially will be part of the education process. We should start to see www and non-www, but the end game will be simply the dot IMHO!
MCD.com is not used for anything else, in case you missed it.
The acronym MCD is not associated globally with McDonalds either. They used the acronym for shortness. If anything, they could have used golm.cd the way Bing uses Bi.ng
At any rate, McDonalds food is nasty 😀
PS Go France!
Or they should buy FrenchFry.com from me 🙂 I think it would be great for advertising campaigns, plus they sell over 1 billion dollar a year of that item.