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UK Media Execs Prove They Are Clueless to Domains, Marketing, Branding

What were they thinking? I’m referring to whoever approved what may be the most bone-headed business decision of the year.

TheDrum.co.uk recently reported on Scottish media group Trinity Mirror’s decision to merge three media publications; the Daily Record, the Sunday Mail, and Scottish and Universal. The three publications were combined to form Media Scotland. Good name, right? Sure, unless of course MediaScotland.com is owned by Trinity Mirror’s direct competitor the Newsquest Herald & Evening Times…but the powers that be would never let that happen, right? Wrong. That’s exactly what happened. Are you kidding me?

Is it possible that company executives are really this clueless? I’ve written about companies using some domains that just don’t make sense, especially when better domains are available, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a company completely re-brand by: a. choosing a new company name where they don’t own the domain name, and b. choosing a new name where their direct competition owns the domain. I don’t think I can phrase it better than Craig McGill did in a  Hostway.co.uk article reporting on the same story…

“Craig McGill, managing director of Contently Managed, a social media PR company, said Trinity Mirror has a track record of not grasping digital concepts and the rules that go with them.

He added: “You would expect that in 2011 they would do the most basic thing of checking if the URL that matches the new company name and branding is available and secure it.”

Not grasping digital concepts…I think I just found my new favorite line for companies that just don’t get it. I used to just refer to it as ‘stupid’.

In case you were wondering about MediaScotland.co.uk, that domain is already owned by a company called EDOCO.

Dec 13 2011
Domain Spotlight:

TypeBee.com 

3 Replies to “UK Media Execs Prove They Are Clueless to Domains, Marketing, Branding”

  1. Oops. Somebody didn’t do a search on Google…

    There has been a history of this happening in the pre-internet era. Communication was limited so it was forgivable. But now, there really is no excuse…anybody with a little search engine savvy could have stopped that. Mind you you don’t have to even have search engine savvy…

    Ugh.

  2. You found a gem Shane.

    I can’t say I have ever seen such a stupid name/branding change.

    Those CEO’s should all be fired for being stuck in the 1950’s.

    Now we have a fixed bar level on stupidity, I mean, not grasping digital concepts, let’s see if this case can ever been beaten….LOL. 🙂

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