States Advertising Generic Domain Names

In the past week, I saw two states advertising great generic .com domain names, and I was impressed that their national campaigns included an intelligent domain name strategy. The South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation, and Tourism operates SouthCarolinaParks.com and SouthCarolinaGolf.com among many others (137 according to Registrant Search), and they used the golf domain name in their television commercial. This domain name redirects to DiscoverSouthCarolina.com, the main website of the SCPRT.
VermontVacation.com is another website I saw advertised this past week. The domain name is owned and operated by the Vermont Department of Tourism and Marketing, who also owns BestFoliage.com and GreatFoliage.com, with both names pointed to VermontVacation.com. There may be better domain names to own related to the state of Vermont (VermontSkiing.com for example), but it was a smart move to purchase and brand a sensible .com domain name.
It’s great to see states using these great generic domain names to advertise their tourism departments. Generic domain names in the .com extension are easy for television viewers to recall, and when a state organization spends tens of thousands of dollars on advertising campaigns, it is nice to see that they didn’t skimp on the domain names.
Many organizations think that just by creating a commercial and setting up a website, people will find them. As I blogged about the USPS FakeChecks.org campaign a while ago, this is not always the case. The USPS learned this the hard way, and they purchased FakeChecks.com after their FakeChecks.org campaign was launched, presumably after learning that consumers were confused and typed in the .com name in error. Owning an easy to recall .com generic domain name is essential when advertising in mainstream media.