Lucy Fisher wrote a piece for the Guardian today about marketers and brands needing to sit up and take notice.

She got feedback from a few brands that have made the move to their own .brand. David Green gave some comments on why KPMG got their own extension and what benefits he sees coming from the move. There is some insight in how brands will view these differently than domainers and other Internet observers.

From the article:

“Some will really come out swinging with this, and critical mass could lead to genuine behaviour change,” she says. “Google’s not coming out and saying it, but they’ve invested hundreds of millions, as has Amazon.”

 

David Green, head of global digital marketing at KPMG, which applied for the .kpmg suffix, has also been forthright about the implications of this new wave of gTLDs. He likens the changes to previous industrial revolutions, making the point that top-level domains are not just web addresses, but “massively scalable” databases, which could be used for industrial-scale applications.

 

Sam Breunig, associate director at another of the “Big Four” accountancy firms, Deloitte, leads its global digital channels team and has been involved with the firm’s .deloitte application. He admits that there was a desire to be seen to be “shaping the trends rather than reacting” to them.

 

“We expect tangible benefits to come of it,” he says, while admitting that the impact on the organisation’s bottom line will be difficult to measure. He says an early advantage of the decision has been to force Deloitte to take a more “thoughtful” approach to domain name management.

Other commenters in the piece talk about how Amazon could change the game not only for themselves but for a greater overall adoption rate.

Read the whole article on the Guardian website.