Digital Marketing Innovations and the dot Brand Registry

Speaker: Peter LaMantia

Peter LaMantia
When we look back a few years from now, I believe we’ll see that this moment marked the beginning of a new era in brand marketing. What we’re talking about today isn’t a small shift—it’s transformational.

I hope you find this session valuable. The domain space can be a challenging one to understand—it’s technical and often misunderstood—but make no mistake: domain and IP infrastructure is universal and foundational to the internet worldwide.

The more you, as a brand, understand what it means to own a registry, the more you’ll recognize how these new capabilities and the technologies developing around them will change how all brands engage and market.

Let’s dive in.

Content Overview

Here’s what I’ll cover today:

• The implications of brand registries and what they mean for marketers.
• A little background about me.
• The brand story—why companies applied for registries and what lies ahead through 2020.
• Why every major and aspiring brand will eventually own a brand registry.
• Some early use cases and how to think about them.
• A concept I call dotBrand IQ—your organization’s readiness to innovate.
• How to turn ideation into go-to-market execution.
• What Authentic Web is building to support brands.
• Key recommendations and a quick Q&A at the end.

The Changing Taxonomy of the Internet

I think of taxonomy as “order.” We’re entering a new order on the internet—an environment with an overwhelming amount of content, now categorized and contextualized by new top-level domains.

This expansion will help users navigate the web more intuitively—by interest, geography, or brand. We’ll move from randomness to structure. Content will have more meaning, and brands will have more control.

People often ask, What’s so different about this expansion? Haven’t we seen TLD growth before?

Two things make this wave different:

1. Scale. We’re not talking about a dozen new TLDs; we’re talking about more than a thousand.
2. Significance. Many of these new TLDs have meaning—real-world associations like .bank, .insurance, .club, or proprietary brand spaces like .apple or .google.

Owning a namespace fundamentally changes how a company markets and delivers services. As a registry, you have control, security, and authenticity at a scale that wasn’t possible before. These new capabilities will drive innovation across industries.

Capabilities of a Brand Registry

The first and most obvious capability is ownership and authenticity. A dotBrand space is pure, secure, and completely yours. Every investment you make in it adds to your brand’s long-term digital equity—unlike third-party platforms, it’s under your control.

It also gives you data visibility. You can see how audiences engage within your brand ecosystem and understand that engagement in ways previously hidden by intermediaries.

Then there’s intuitive navigation. Imagine someone typing prius.toyota, chair.ikea, or deal.bestbuy. Once consumers understand that the dotBrand represents authenticity, this navigation behavior will become natural.

Finally, there are service innovations—ways to connect products, data, and identities. For example, vin.brand for an automaker could assign each vehicle its own secure presence, tied to its digital service record. Combine that with DNSSEC and IoT capabilities, and the possibilities are huge.

About Me

I’ve been working in the domain and web services space since the late 1990s. I co-founded a web hosting company in Canada called It’s Easy Hosting, which became the market leader at the time. I later spent a decade as a management consultant helping CEOs launch digital services before joining Hostopia, a private-label web services platform provider that served telecom companies.

When Hostopia was acquired by Deluxe Corporation—a Fortune 1000 company—I stayed on as President, leading its domain, web, and digital marketing services. In 2011, I moved into the emerging top-level domain (TLD) space and wrote the business plan and application for .club, which successfully launched soon after.

That experience opened my eyes to the massive potential of registries and the expansion of the domain namespace, leading me to found Authentic Web in 2012 to help brands manage these next-generation digital challenges and opportunities.

The Brand Story

Why did brands apply for registries?

Back in 2011, most did so defensively—they wanted to protect their names and intellectual property. When ICANN revealed in 2012 that 1,930 applications had been submitted—619 from brands—it became clear that this was something far larger than expected.

From 2012 through 2013, brands navigated a long, complex process. As of 2014, the real conversation shifted: We have this registry—now what do we do with it?

Between now and 2020, we’ll see who uses it strategically and who falls behind. The brands that innovate early will have a long-term advantage that’s difficult for competitors to match.

Why Brands Will Embrace a Registry Strategy

There are two big drivers: defense and opportunity.

On the defensive side, today’s digital environment is costly and unsustainable.

Consider a scenario:
If your brand defends trademarks across 22 traditional gTLDs at an average of \(30 per domain, that’s about **\)231,000** in annual cost. Expanding that to 700 new gTLDs could cost $7 million—with no return on investment. Even at 10% coverage, you’re still spending millions just to defend your name.

That approach doesn’t scale. Instead, anchor your brand on your dotBrand registry. Make it clear to consumers: If it’s not .brand, it’s not us.

This is especially powerful for luxury goods or high-trust industries like finance. By setting expectations and driving activity to your authenticated namespace, you lower risk and reclaim control.

The Opportunity Side

This is where things get exciting—brand registries unlock innovation potential.

A few example use cases:

• customer.brand – Build personalized spaces for customers, strengthen loyalty, and enhance advocacy.
• channel.brand – Deliver consistent content across partner and distributor networks while gaining visibility and performance analytics.
• promotion.brand or campaign.brand – Simplify marketing URLs, make them memorable, and lift response rates.
• service.brand – Offer targeted digital experiences or product-specific content.

Let’s take one example:
A large insurance company with thousands of agents could replace inconsistent microsites with agentname.brand pages. Corporate marketing could distribute content and analytics directly, ensuring consistency, compliance, and measurement.

That level of control and efficiency is game-changing.

Marketing & Brand Engagement

Marketers spend millions driving audiences to URLs like toyota.com/prius-family. That’s long and easy to forget. Now imagine prius.toyota. Simple. Elegant. Memorable.

Even small lifts in campaign response rates can translate into major financial returns. A dotBrand makes digital calls-to-action more powerful and intuitive.

From Strategy to Execution

Building a dotBrand strategy doesn’t happen overnight. It requires:

• Leadership and permission to innovate.
• A cross-functional, agile team that bridges marketing, IT, brand, and legal.
• Knowledgeable domain and DNS experts.
• Systems purpose-built for registry management.

At a practical level, you need the ability to request, approve, provision, and measure domain activity seamlessly—and to do it securely, at scale.

At Authentic Web, we’ve been developing an enterprise-grade platform specifically designed for this. It gives brands control, visibility, and automation without sacrificing agility. It empowers organizations to innovate within secure boundaries and integrate with CMS, analytics, and e-commerce tools—all tied to your registry.

dotBrand IQ

A brand’s dotBrand IQ measures its understanding and adoption progress along an evolution curve.

1. Dismissers: Didn’t apply or withdrew.
2. Defenders: Applied for legal protection only.
3. Learners: Beginning to explore use cases.
4. Experimenters: Testing small initiatives with cross-functional teams.
5. Innovators: Actively integrating dotBrand into operations.
6. Visionaries: Using dotBrand to disrupt markets and reshape models.

Where are you today? Where do you want to be in six months, one year, or two years? The curve will shift rapidly as adoption grows, and those moving early will have the greatest advantage.

Getting Started

To move from ideation to go-to-market, follow a structured process:

1. Identify the gap and ideate solutions.
2. Define the strategy and validate it.
3. Build an execution plan.
4. Go to market, measure, and iterate.

Success requires leadership buy-in, an empowered team, domain expertise, system infrastructure, and a culture open to innovation.

Recommendations for Brands

1. Leverage your first-mover advantage—competitors can’t replicate what they didn’t apply for.
2. Start building internal expertise now; dotBrand IQ takes time to grow.
3. Foster a culture of innovation—get leadership approval to experiment.
4. Form a small cross-functional team empowered to act.
5. Engage with experts but also build in-house knowledge.
6. Align internal stakeholders across functions early.
7. Set short-term, achievable goals; scale from early wins.
8. Run pilots—try easy uses like promotion.brand or campaign.brand.
9. Keep your dotBrand additive at first; no need to replace existing domains.
10. Build for scale with systems that can grow alongside your registry.

Brand registries are new, but they represent a massive opportunity—one that will define digital brand leadership for the next decade.

Thank you for listening. I hope this session helps you think about how your brand can capture this opportunity. If you’d like to discuss ideas or learn more, please reach out—I’d be happy to continue the conversation.

Thank you, Peter. That was an excellent and insightful presentation. Thanks to everyone who joined and for your thoughtful questions. This concludes today’s webinar. Have a great day, everyone.