I’m having a hard time thinking of a way to trump my skinning of Name Pros. If anyone has any suggestions, please email them to rick AT ricklatona.com.
I want to “keep the pedal to the metal” as they would say. I have no problem continuing to up my ad budget but I don’t want to be normal about it. I’m a huge fan of creative advertising.
Too bad the entry fees are so high at our trade shows. It would have been a lot of fun to have gotten 500 pretty girls to walk around wearing ricklatona.com t-shirts at the Domain Roundtable conference. Yes, that was in fact a serious option we worked on. The goal was to have 1 girl for every 1 attendee.
© 2010
Rick,
The 1 girl per attendee thing would have been amazing. Next time you should work with the conference organizers to make this an actual advertised benefit of going to the conference. Might have actually gotten me to go this year, if only for the day the girls would have been there.
How about having a program written that performs some function domainers need, downloaded free from RickLatona.com. I know you like to be creative with advertising, but sometimes you have to think about targeted traffic not just curiosity traffic.
If you can get 500 pretty girls to a domain tradeshow, I’m sure you will find plenty of attendees willing to help subsidize your booth fee.
I used to attend many a tradeshow hawking products I designed. One of the largest and most exhausting was the JPMA show in Dallas, Texas. One of the best giveaways I came up with was soft shoe inserts imprinted with the slogan, “Your feet are thanking me now, why don’t you come by and thank me tomorrow? B27 Peek-A-Boo-Cover-You
At night, as the buyer would take off their shoes it was one of the last things they saw before they went to sleep and in the morning a definate reminder of my product! I had a slew of orders from the insoles and I brought them back every year because I was now the first stop on the tradeshow circuit – before their feet got tired!
You said that you were seriously considering it… but hopefully you were jesting…I know the “sexy girl” thing is hot… but you have daughters, and very quickly at about age 12-13 they start looking eerily similar to these hot chicks..and when you notice that other men are noticing it will turn your whole perspective around. My daughter is 14 (and a half- she will add) and when you are at Target and you start to see the guys age 10-75 eyeball her it gets very creepy. I hope that your girls will be the domainers attending the conference because they are following in Dad’s shoes and not one of the “hot chicks” someone hired that everybody is coming on to.
Jamie and Jorge, I am assuming that you are single, with no daughters…
Rick,
There was a lot of chatter yesterday in the Domain Roundtable Live Auction forum about ‘how little’ domain auctions do to earn their commissions. Everyone agreed that advertising these events OUTSIDE of the domain community would help immensely and is a better strategy in the long run to gaining exposure and increasing prices. As a rule, there is not much competition between collectors of domains; but there is in business – especially big business. If DRT Auction had been our advertising agency’s client and Holiday.com was the featured domain, we would’ve (first, counseled them to lower the reserve) strategically promoted that to every competitor of Holiday Inn and to all the big travel agencies and created a bidding war.
I’m both a fan of NASCAR and the GoDaddy service, but when I saw the GD logo racing around the track on Dale Earnhardt’s car, I cringed. GoDaddy was advertising to the mainstream and that meant increased competition for the few good unregistered domains out there. However, what is also means is GoDaddy is increasing the general public’s (and business’) awareness of the need for a good domain – and that will eventually drive auction prices up -but only if the public knows the auction is happening.
Arguments of the marketing tactic aside, if you wanted to increase awareness of your service, I’d point those 500 models to an event like The Masters to attract the decision-makers or to any of the advertising and marketing shows and educate the ‘influencers’ of the benefits of domains, for either their brand’s foundation of use in a creative marketing campaign.
If you’re going to stick with print advertising, I’d buy one page in AdWeek and one in BrandWeek.
Thanks for the great service – and for advertising it.
If you take the girl route think Robert Palmer…
His girls were hot! Check out this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F0U5JfGYx4c
You really think they are playing the instruments…they can sell!
You make a great, and important, point Kelly.
But even if one doesn’t have a wife or any daughters…most everyone has sisters, cousins, aunts…and mothers.
I knew someone was going to comment on the 500 “pretty girls” idea, lol. This just shows it’s still controversial enough and will get attention and people writing about you even after the event on their blogs.
Rick said he was just going to have them wear his t-shirts — not run around naked
Kelly, guys are going to “eyeball” pretty women no matter what they are wearing.
Scott,
So true… it is just so Neanderthal.. I think it is probably one of those differences in the sexes that we will never quite understand. Believe me, at 44yrs and counting, no one is are asking anyone to stop with the eyeballing… Just for a minute imagine going to a domain conference where 500 “enhanced” men are standing around in tight ricklatona.com shorts? See where I am going?
I’m in the same boat as you Kelly. I agree 110%.
But the end of that last comment made me cringe at the thought. lol
Rick,
Look where the heck we ended up without you around!!! Are we nuts or what? I guess we are just passing time till you write something to get us going again…
Kelly, stop coming to my site if you have such issues.
Just saw your ad in Website Magazine today. That’s why I am here. Your ad stood out. Really funky.
Ditto Donna! Cool ad – Cool Rick Latona.