Since my background is in the direct marketing business, I pay attention to infomercials and other marketing efforts specifically to analyze the execution. Some of these commercials (maybe most) are cheesy, but everything from dialog, domains, actors, and product placement has a purpose. The domain name is also important, and in many cases, it’s used for testing purposes.
I saw a commercial today for the “Pasta ‘N More” pasta maker, which seems to be a plastic container used to help cook various types of pasta. The product was being offered by one of the top direct marketers – Telebrands. This product isn’t something of interest to me, but the domain name they used was FreePastaNMore.com.
The url seemed a bit confusing and certainly didn’t pass the radio test, which was surprising to me because most call to action direct marketing efforts (especially radio and tv) do their best to make their phone numbers and urls easy to remember.
I decided to check to see if they registered the potential typos, and it looks like they did. Here are some of their domain names for this product:
- FreePastaNMore.com
- FreePastaAndMore.com
- PastaAndMore.com
- PastaNMore.com
- PastandMore.com
It’s good to see marketers protect their brand, as many companies neglect to do so and are forced to pay for this traffic on a continual basis, rather than the one time registration fee.