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gordonandfrank.ca

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.

Frankandgordon

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:

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Major Canadian Brands Launch New Looks

No doubt there will be lots of Monday-morning quarterbacking about three big marketing events this weekend: Bell’s “Frank and Gordon”, The new Globe And Mail website, and Global TV’s rebranding.
We’ll most likely have analysis on the first two shortly but wanted to give you folks a chance for early reactions. What to you think of these new campaigns?
Any thoughts on the timing loads of deep-pocketed American brands are trying to get the attention of the press and public on Superbowl weekend? Add your two cents now…

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Why AOL White Lists Matter In Canada

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some press releases about AOL and changes to their white list programs including lower thresholds to stay on these white lists and an announcement about the use of “e-mail postage”:http://www.google.com/search?q=%22e-mail+postage%22 (stay tuned for more on this topic later in the week). This stuff is even getting coverage in the “New York Times”:http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/technology/05AOL.html.
Even if you don’t have a lot of AOL email addresses in your marketing database it is important to know about, and comply with, AOL’s rules on getting messages to the inbox.
If you want to learn more about AOL white listing, especially their use of standard and enhanced white list programs, a good read is the February sixth Email Insider article from David Baker called “Does ‘Enhanced White List’ Mean Anything to You?”:http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=39434. _(sub req’d)_
In essence, AOL has two different white lists and their enhanced version has much more stringent conditions to qualify but also provides greater benefit to the sender. To get your marketing email delivered to a recipient inbox you need to know that AOL uses tough measures to screen and filter senders, IP addresses, content and more. If you want to get good deliverability rates it is imperative to work with an email service provider (ESP) that has white list relationships with the major ISPs (AOL, etc.) and web mail providers (Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.). This will provide an email sender with a some “benefit of the doubt” when it comes to getting email through. Enhanced white lists, like AOL’s, take it a step further and pretty much ensure all your email gets into the right inbox. In the case of AOL and their AOL 9.0, where images are turned off by default (like with Google’s Gmail), the enhanced white list relationship means that you also have images turned on automatically. For consumer-focused email marketers in the US this is very important.
As a Canadian email marketer how does this affect you?

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