6 word domain name on the radio? — Advertising a

Why is this fresh home community asking radio listeners to remember a six word domain name?

I heard a radio advertisement yesterday for a fresh 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 stated.

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. Following 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 (counting one with a digit!) to do it is a bad idea.

I found plenty of better and shorter domain names the firm could have used. I’m scratching my head.