Brand development agency Pappas Group is helping .CO Internet SAS roll out its integrated campaign to promote the new .co web extension, which went live July 20.
The campaign includes e-mail, direct mail, international print and online advertising, online video, event marketing and websites. The campaign, which began rolling out two months ago in phases, will run for the next half-year.
Arlington, VA-based Pappas group picked nine target audiences, including trademark attorneys, web professionals and entrepreneurs, for the campaign.
“This is going to be competitive to dot-com because dot-com is kind of full right now,” asserted Anthony Pappas, president and founder of Pappas Group. “There are 80 or 90 million domains, maybe more. The beauty is that for the time being you have the ability to get that domain that you’ve always wanted.”
About 100,000 .co domains were sold in the first 25 minutes they were on sale, and about 250,000 were sold in the first 24 hours, Pappas said. Rare single-letter domains, such as O.co, purchased by Overstock.com, and T.co, purchased by Twitter, were among those snatched up quickly.
Pappas Group created the website opportunity.co to promote the domain extension and pitch.co, which hosted a contest encouraging people to submit ideas for a business or blog using a .co address. The contest received nearly 300 entries and received more than 200,000 page views. The winner received $50,000 toward a new website.
