SUCCESSCLICK.COM

A COMPANY WE THOUGHT GOT IT, DIDN’T

Kicking back tonight watching TV, trying to push my intellectual levels to new highs, I saw a national commercial for the first time in a long time. Now, that’s not strange in itself, except I usually don’t watch TV unless it’s on my DVR. I speed through the commercials.

The weird thing is that I watched this commercial for Proctor & Gamble’s “CASCADE” dishwashing detergent, and quickly found the bizarre, the unbelievable, the incredulous domain name P&G allowed their Madison Avenue Ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, to use for the campaign of their “all in one” dishwashing detergent. This campaign was launched almost a year ago, but this was the first time I’ve seen their TV ad.

To the point quickly: The commercial wants you to know that Cascade will “do it all” with their new product. No more soaking, rinsing, scrubbing, etc. any dishes before putting them in your dishwasher. Your kitchen items will all come out clean enough to, well, use again use as food utensils without e-coli issues.

On their webpage, they use terms like “Actionpacs™”, “Do it All,” “All In 1″ and “immaculate dishes” (they don’t own these domains except for Actionpacs.com, which points to their site).  All of these phrases are fairly decent catchphrases to use to bolster their backbranding of Cascade. Did they try to buy these domains from the end user, or even see if these domains were unregistered? I don’t know. Why didn’t they just use “actionpac.com” since they are TMing the phrase and own the domain?

So what domain name does the Cascade dishwashing detergent commercial feature to promote their new product?

THEULTIMATEBUTTON.COM

That’s right, a domain name that bears no resemblance at all to their cover copy, subheadings, taglines, or even their product. “Ultimate Button”?  And they purchased a domain name with the word “THE” as the prefix. (Sometimes this works, but only in perfectly balanced cases). Why would a major ad agency, and the marketing director of a firm that previously “got it” about domains (they own a fantastic stable of one word generics for their prodservs), suddenly drop the ball on this one?

It is clearly an advertising agency gaffe, and somebody will probably lose their job from it. Just looking at the Cascade homepage, and knowing they own some nice domains they could have used to “backbrand” Cascade online, I find this very curious.

Elaine Wong of Brandweek wrote the article at the beginning of the ad campaign, dated coincidentally (I SWEAR!) exactly a year ago today. The last sentence in her article, seemingly reveals to us how big business is handling their “domain control” branding and “Owning Their Competition™” online:

“P&G spent $43 million advertising Cascade in 2007 … per Nielsen Monitor-Plus.”  Yes, you read that right. $43 million in marketing/advertising for one product alone. You’d think they would set aside at least $1 mill to pick up some stray generic domains that made sense to their prodservs.

After seeing this commercial and their lame domain branding attempt, I immediately went to Fab and bought these beauties:

SuperDishwasher.com
SuperDishwashing.com
BestDishSoap.com
UltimateDishwashing.com

If the marketing director for P&G is reading this right now, they should get the hint that these domains can be purchased by a competitor to brand their dish detergent for less than $100k.  If they don’t realize these domains, without a doubt, give “theultimatebutton.com” a knockout punch to the ear, with a late tag to the eye, then I’d worry about my job. From my experience working in both the advertising and domain industry, I consider this domain name promotion, “theultimatebutton.com” an embarrassment for P&G and Saatchi & Saatchi.