Your .co.uk success story awaits...

Nigel · Oct 3, 2013

Anyone else noticed Nominet's banner ads appearing on business/trade websites in the last couple of days. The ad starts with:

Your .co.uk success story awaits...

and ad directs you to the agreatplacetobe site which promotes .co.uk domains above any other extension.

Only noticed it for first time yesterday and it just popped up again today on a plasterers forum. Makes me think that they've just started a major .co.uk marketing campaign - which would be strange if .co.uk was about to be demoted by the second level .uk - I'm sure nominet must already have a good idea how things are looking i.e. it won't have taken them long to analyse the meagre amount of responses (I think the v1 consultation only resulted in 600 or so responses and I doubt that the v2 response will be a lot better - and a good proportion of those will have been received long before the 23 Sept deadline).

So what do you all think? Has anyone else notice these ads in the last couple of days? and if they have started a .co.uk campaign - does it mean .uk is dead and buried?

Edwin · Oct 3, 2013

No.

This (Nominet advertising .co.uk - not this specific campaign) has been discussed many times before.

Companies don't stop their marketing just because a different product may be down the road. That would be commercial suicide. Doubly so if that product never appears.

Since Nominet have publicly stated their worry about the flood of new GTLD (for which prominent ads are starting to appear on TV and in print) it's neither surprising nor noteworthy that they are seeking to maintain awareness for what is currently their "main" product.

I know it's a long wait until November, but we're all going to have to bide our time before we have ANY more real information to go on.

Nigel · Oct 3, 2013

Edwin said:
No.

This (Nominet advertising .co.uk - not this specific campaign) has been discussed many times before.

Companies don't stop their marketing just because a different product may be down the road. That would be commercial suicide. Doubly so if that product never appears.

Since Nominet have publicly stated their worry about the flood of new GTLD (for which prominent ads are starting to appear on TV and in print) it's neither surprising nor noteworthy that they are seeking to maintain awareness for what is currently their "main" product.

I know it's a long wait until November, but we're all going to have to bide our time before we have ANY more real information to go on.

I would tend to agree with you - BUT this was the first time I noticed these specifically worded banner ads yesterday.

Edwin · Oct 3, 2013

Nigel said:
I would tend to agree with you - BUT this was the first time I noticed these specifically worded banner ads yesterday.

Yes, that was interesting and news to me too. I'm just cautioning about drawing any conclusions at all from them.

Ging · Oct 4, 2013

Received an expired notice.

Is this new ? I thought .co.uk is a great place to be was the branding message ? Subtle change ?

We think that .uk is a great place to be and we hope you've experienced that with your domain name [removed].co.uk. You may not have realised, but [removed].co.uk has expired and if you would like to keep it active you will need to renew it.

Stephen · Oct 4, 2013

future confusion

Ging said:
Received an expired notice.

Is this new ? I thought .co.uk is a great place to be was the branding message ? Subtle change ?

We think that .uk is a great place to be and we hope you've experienced that with your domain name [removed].co.uk. You may not have realised, but [removed].co.uk has expired and if you would like to keep it active you will need to renew it.

Nominet have changed the email wording since 2012, I just found some old notices.

But it shows the confusion if Nominet released .uk then .uk would be a separate tld not a range of tld's as Nominet are using it for,
so its usage now adds to future confusion as to what .uk means!