If it’s not a dotcom it has to be a dotnet, says BigRock

BigRock has rolled out its latest advertising campaign to promote its ‘.net’ offerings in India. The company had recently formed a partnership with VeriSign to promote these offerings in the Indian SME market.

The TVC created by Ideas@work looks to build the popularity of ‘dotnet’ usernames in India. It shows several SME owners on a conveyor belt moving around until they get the ‘dotcom’ or ‘dotnet’ stamp. Prior to the stamp, the owners are stationary. Once the stamp is received, life is infused into these people and they’re shown performing an activity based on their department of work.

On the TVC, Zarvan Patel, founder, Ideas@work, said, “For this campaign we were tasked with promoting ‘dotnet’. In America, ‘dotnet’ is the second preference to ‘dotcom’. In India, this is not the case as ‘dotin’ takes the second preference. We deviated from the original strategy of BigRock to promote ‘dotnet’ and tell people that the company owns domains under this platform as well.”

Shashank Mehrotra, general manager and business head, BigRock, said, “The core brief was around promoting ‘dotnet’. This is one of internet’s great brands and is the second largest generic domain extension on the net, but people don’t look at it like that. For this campaign we had a two pronged objective – one was to raise the awareness of dotnet and the other to highlight the fact that dotnet is applicable to everybody.”

He added, “This time around there’s only one TVC. It’s a more involved TVC and I would like to say it is different from our earlier campaigns. We wanted to equate dotnet and dotcom together. The parentage of dotcom and dotnet are the same as both are managed by Verisign.”

The film went on air on 16 September and will be on air for six weeks.

The TVC is also being promoted on BigRock’s YouTube channel. Along with the film and a digital campaign, the company has also lined up on-ground initiatives for this campaign. A series of events (currently in Mumbai and New Delhi) have been initiated through which they are talking to website designers and developers to promote dotnet.