.brands Spotlight: ads.amazon

It’s been almost ten years since the application for .amazon was submitted to ICANN and for the majority of this time, it seemed entirely possible that the global giant may not have the opportunity to get its own .brand.

However, the team at Amazon worked their way through a myriad of ‘interesting’ policy and international governmental challenges to finally get access to .amazon last year and the launch of the TLD in the last few months is big news for the .brand community.

Creative use of .amazon should come as no surprise however. Amazon have been incredibly active in the new TLD program through the submission of over 70 TLD applications, numerous launches of generic TLDs to date and of course, the extensive use of .aws in global campaigns that we have commented on regularly here at makeway.world. 

A number of redirects are in place for the key Amazon brands – including prime.amazon, kindle.amazon and alexa.amazon – but these seem to have minimal activation to date.

However, ads.amazon is the organization’s first foreray into using .amazon with some vigour and is designed to support Amazon’s advertising business which generates nearly 7 Billion in quarterly revenue according to recent reports.

What we really love is the use of ads.amazon/<code> as a short link on social media, replacing the previous link identity of advertising.amazon.com/<code> in April this year.

We’ve long proposed that organizations invest in improving the link identity and consumer brand trust for their social media links given that scammers can create branded alternatives with ease.

Using ads.amazon as a link shortener delivers unprecedented security for Amazon and simply cannot be spoofed by cyber criminals.

What’s next for .amazon? Only time will tell.

What we can say is that we’re really excited to see what they come up with given their reach and historical focus on innovation and pushing the industry boundaries.

GoDaddy acquired Neustar's registry business as of August 3, 2020.