This whole “Gordon and Frank” thing is offering some really interesting insights into cross-channel marketing.
Not up-to-speed on the saga? Here’s a recap:
# Superbowl Sunday – See Bell Beaver ads tagged with “frankandgordon.ca”:http://www.frankandgordon.ca/ URL, wonder if they registered “gordonandfrank.ca”:http://www.gordonandfrank.ca/. They didn’t.
# Register the domain.
# Monday February 6th – write an “article for One Degree”:http://www.onedegree.ca/2006/02/06/gordonandfrankca explaining why Bell probably should have bought the alternate domain and point gordonandfrank.ca at it.
# Read “the Marketing Magazine article”:http://www.marketingmag.ca/magazine/current/the_work/article.jsp?content=20060206_74079_74079 _(sub. req.d)_ and realize this is a *huge* campaign that will go well beyond the Olympics.
# Wait for someone at “Bell”:http://www.bell.ca or “Cossette”:http://www.cossette.com to notice.
So, after one week, where were we:
* 6,618 pages served.
* 1,225 people clicked through to the real Bell site.
* 745 people got here by searching with words like Bell, Beavers, Frank, Gordon.
* “Bell Beavers” is the most common search term that gets people here.
* 34 people got here because of Norm MacDonald. A lot of them are angry.
* Then again, some people love the beavers so much they’re looking to buy Frank and Gordon plushies.
* The National Post’s Mark Evans “talks to”:http://evans.blogware.com/blog/_archives/2006/2/14/1761227.html “Frank and Gordon”.
* Still no word from Bell or Cossette.
Things we can learn from this exercise:
Category: Frank & Gordon
Bell’s new mascots – two talking beavers named Frank and Gordon – have an eponymous web site – frankandgordon.ca.
I’m glad to see that the folks working on the site heeded One Degree’s recent advice and allow people to drop the "www" and still get to the site.
I also really like that they registered the .com version of the domain but still use the .ca in the ads to make it clear this is a Canadian thing.
Unfortunately they didn’t read an older One Degree post called How To Add Spell-check To Your Domain Names (go read it, I’ll wait). Now there might be some obvious typo domains that they could have registered (and they may have for that matter – I didn’t check them all), but I know they missed a really big and obvious problem with that domain.
Imagine this scenario which is close but not quite what Bell’s marketers imagined happening: