What's with all these "radio" website ads? (1 Viewer)

[Brian Perry]

First I heard an ad for "radioturbotax.com", and now I'm hearing ads for "dellradio.com". What's the point?

When you go to dellradio.com it simply directs you to the small business section of dell.com -- the content is no different than if you went directly to dell.com. Are these "new" websites created only for the purpose of monitoring how effective their radio commercials are? If so, I think they're extremely stupid -- anyone who wants a Dell knows to go right to dell.com.

 

[Scott McGillivray]

Just a goofy marketing idea. Think of it sort of like "Dave TV" from David Lee Roth. It is not that Dell is selling or doing anything with radios, just that their marketing campaign on the radio is called "Dell Radio".
Dumb idea that, it looks like, never took off.

 

[Edwin-S]

Yeah, and then the ISPs and telcoms tell us how they need the freedom to shape traffic because the pipes are getting clogged up: just not clogged enough for stupid ideas like these to be kiboshed.

 

[MarkHastings]

Perhaps they're trying to get marketing info by counting the number of hits to Dell's website via that particular URL? This way they'd be able to determine how many people heard the ad and visited the site (which they wouldn't be able to figure out by the number of hits via dell.com)

or maybe they're hoping on getting more visits out of shear curiosity? Brain, if they had just said "visit Dell.com", you probably wouldn't have visited, but you did visit because of the different URL. Marketing is all about getting the name out there.

 

[Scott_J]

That was my thinking. They're probably trying to figure out how many visitors they're getting based on that radio campaign.

It's like commercials I see on TV for some fly-by-night companies that have a /5 or something after the URL. I assume they use different numbers depending on what channel the commercial's on to try to figure out which channels are the most effective for them to advertise on.