Bell Comments On One Degree’s Gordon And Frank Experiment

Back on February 6th, we started an interesting experiment here at One Degree when I registered “gordonandfrank.ca” and pointed it to a One Degree article about the importance of protecting domain names. That post and several subsequent ones drew lots of traffic and a load of comments. One common theme was “why hasn’t Bell or Cossette” said anything about this. Well, now they have…

Late last week I received this e-mail from Elaine Bissonnette, Director, National Creative Lead and Brand for Bell Canada. Here’s her message to us:

Thank you for your comments and I must say that everyone at Cossette and Bell visits your web site judging by the number of emails I got. I agree with all of your comments about web domain names and spell check. We actually register all possible spell check errors when we advertise a web site in our communications. In this case since the web site was originally launched in Quebec back in October 2005 and we turned around in a record time to deliver everything, this has been overlooked by the folks at Cossette and me. This has been a great learning experience and most of my colleagues which are actually fan of yours and did relay the message.

By the way the “www.frankandgordon.ca” site got a tremendous response with an average time per visit of 5 minutes (actually 35% of the visitors spend between 10 to 29 minutes on the site) and judging by the number of “pin the tail” download lots of kids will be playing this game during Birthday parties! We are looking at an update for the new campaign coming soon. Once again the comments are noted and I will make sure the team registers it as a priority in the next web campaign.

Regards,
Elaine Bissonnette
Director, Chef Divisionnaire National Creative lead and Brand Creation nationale et Marque

My guess is Bell handled this correctly. Wait for the storm to die down and then follow-up with a friendly, non-confrontational e-mail rather than coming down hard with lawyers and counter-arguments.

So dear reader, what’s your take? What should Bell have done? Does this resolve the issue? Better yet, what should I do with the domain gordonandfrank.ca? Point it to the real site? Keep it here? Or?


Originally published at www.onedegree.ca on April 10, 2006.