Why is this new home community asking radio listeners to remember a six word domain name?
I heard a radio advertisement yesterday for a new home community outside of Austin called Rocky Creek.
Like many planned developments, this one was built in phases. Once the first phase was mostly sold they started developing the second. Now they’re selling homes in the third phase.
The commercial ended with a call to action:
“Visit Rocky Creek phase three now open dot com,” the voice said.
Huh? Say that again?
Thankfully the announcer obliged and repeated that same six word web address.
When I got home I typed the domain name in as
RockyCreekPhaseThreeNowOpen.com.
It didn’t resolve, so I tried it with a “3” instead of “three” and it worked. (How’s that for literally failing the radio test!)
This is quite perplexing. After playing around with the site for a while it seems that the specific site was set up to track how well the radio spot performs.
Using a unique web address to test an offline ad is a good idea. Using such a long domain name (including one with a digit!) to do it is a bad idea.
I found plenty of better and shorter domain names the company could have used. I’m scratching my head.
DR.DOMAIN says
As it relates to saying numbers in a radio ad: Would it be obvious that the advertiser wanted you to type numbers in the case of a domain like: 212RENTALS.COM (?)
Andrew Allemann says
As in an area code? Yes, I’d assume I heard the local area code in a number that it was the digits. Same thing for any string of digits.
John Poole says
Rocky Creek probably negotiated a media ad buy based on the number of “hits” the radio ad generated — a smart play for Rocky Creek / bad for the radio station since not many will go to the 6 word domain name used. However most radio listeners will remember “Rocky Creek” and Google search “Rocky Creek” brings up rockycreekliving.com (the main website) as #1 on the SERP!
Joseph Peterson says
@John Poole,
That makes the company either completely incompetent or incredibly cunning.
Curious which it is … Leaning on the former, based on experience; but I’d love it to be #2.