Building a Brand Top-Level Domain Business Case
Our CEO Peter LaMantia in collaboration with the Brand Registry Group delivered an educational webinar for business, digital and IT leaders. In this webinar Peter ran through a methodology to create a Business Case to support investment decisions to JUMP THE CURVE to an authentic, secure, controlled and TRUSTED Brand Top-Level domain space.
BRIEF
Brand Top-Level Domain innovation is an opportunity to JUMP THE CURVE. You can build a better, more efficient, and brand trusted digital ecosystem that is owned, scalable, secure and trusted. Brand Top-Level Domain business case costs and benefits can be difficult to understand and quantify for leaders contemplating the value of applying, owning and deploying a Brand Top-Level Domain strategy.
Peter solves the complexity for you with a model to quantify the current and increasing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) of managing domains, DNS, Transport Layer Security (TLS) certificates and Brand Protection cost centres. He will then share how these status quo operating costs can be significantly reduced over 5 and 10-year timelines. The model also shows how innovation opportunities can be quantified to generate top line growth and contribution margin improvements.
Don’t miss the second part in the “Jump The Curve” video series
Click here welcome to
uh our second webinar of the 2020 dot
brand
vision series this is brought to you by
the brand registry group
or brg for short my name is
martin sutton the executive director of
the
brg which is a trade association for
brands that operate their
own top level domain or intend to apply
at the next opportunity for many brands
those that already operate their own top
level domain as well as those
considering applying in the future
the development of a business case can
be both complex
and daunting and so in our webinar today
we will see how this can be approached
and provide insights to modelling
return on investment across digital
marketing
brand protection and security
so i’m extremely pleased to introduce
you today to
peter lamantia he’s the ceo of authentic
web
and peter has been an active member of
the brand
registry group representing a doc brand
operator
and also leading our registry operations
and best practices committee
over the last year um today peter will
be presenting a high-level view for you
today
and we will have an opportunity at the
end of his presentation
for questions and answers
during the presentation you can populate
your questions in the uh question panel
uh so please do that we’ll keep an eye
on those so that
when we get to the end of the
presentation we’ll be prepared to spend
some time
um to to cover off those questions
so uh with that i will now hand you over
to peter
great thanks martin um thanks everybody
for joining today
today what i want to do is put some meat
on the bones
with a business case model to support
the adoption
and investment in a brand tld strategy
at its foundation this is really a
numbers-based business case of how your
organization
can reduce your total cost base and
drive top line contribution margin
it’s a financial rot model road map for
top performing businesses to
jump the curve and anchor all digital
on the trust authority of a proprietary
brand top level domain
so if you like business model math i
think you’re going to find this pretty
compelling
and hope you find it useful as a
methodology to build
communicate and gain investment approval
from your c level it’s going to be a
little bit of a
fun with math webinar so i think i’ll
just get rid of my face so you can see
the full screen
so when we talk about jumping the curve
you probably know this concept as forbes
states
it’s not just about a new product it can
also mean adapting
to a changing environment streamlining
business process
or adopting new technologies
in the context of domains dns and tls
certificates
formerly known as ssl certs and brand
protection
we think about the first generation
starting in the
with manual processes silos both systems
and people ticketing systems email
or telephone the second generation
as many of you may have adopted or in
the process
of establishing more sophisticated
automation systems
with workflow change management controls
audit policy-based provisioning
role-based permissioning to deliver
better security
compliance and performance the second
generation improved the function
and total cost of ownership but at the
core there was still the accumulation of
more domains to manage more dns to lock
down
more certificates to administer and more
brand protection budget and activity
to fend off the bad actors and with the
expansion of the domain space
this is becoming increasingly difficult
and costly
let’s face it you own a lot of domains
and you really don’t want to own them
but you have to and you can’t let them
go
so now we’re entering a paradigm shift
as the third
leading pair the third third change
revolution
the brand top level domains they are
secure controlled
authentic they’re platforms for
innovation
and massively scalable
so thinking about the status quo
in the early 1990s it was easy
one domain one registrar one name server
probably a c level and an i.t resource
at that time there was not even digital
piracy
life was simple then as little house on
the prairie before electricity
over the next 20 years it’s become
increasingly complicated
with hundreds and thousands of domains
multiple registrars many more
dns providers and everyone in the
organization is a stakeholder
in domain names and ever more domains
are registered
a handful for revenue generating
activity
but the lion’s share are just
defensively to protect
against these nefarious actors it’s
complicated
and has driven the adoption of new
systems
and on the brand protection side it has
also become increasingly costly
complicated with exploding
counterfeiting and piracy
and an entire digital vendor ecosystem
that continues to eat up more and more
of your budget every year
expect it to double from 2018 to 2026 by
this research from verified market
research
so it’s always good to get a sense of
what you’re experiencing
and sharing that with other people on
the webinar so
i’m going to ask martin to lob a poll
out there
and if you’d indulge us to conduct a
couple examples
do you have a poll up there martin
yeah the polls are up and running on the
screen for the attendees yeah
okay great so think about you know
what’s your status quo today
what are the increasing costs more
domains dns to manage them more local
presence more
cycles and dns security policies
you know how are you managing that today
and how do you think that cost
might change in five years from today
just give everybody a minute there
we’ll just give a few more seconds to
let the audience select um but most are
in now
so we just give three more seconds three
two one and i shall share the results
okay great okay so that’s interesting so
56 believe sort of 10 to 25
another 40 between 25 and 100.
so i think there’s pretty um pretty much
agreed that the costs are going to go up
so the second poll let’s do one more
here
let me know when that’s up there martin
all right now think about the efficacy
of those added cost added domains and
expenditures
in five years what do you think the
efficacy will be of those programs will
it be better
will it be worse will it be the same
most people i talk to comment on how
it’s a whack-a-mole game
more system can simply create more work
and expose more problems
so we’ll just let these
see some coming in here so just click on
the button
what you think
we’ll just go a few more seconds there’s
still a few more to vote
okay thanks for that i shall reveal now
the poll
okay great well about 30 percent about
the same
31 percent a little more effective so
that’s
a good view and about 30
somewhat or significantly less effective
so okay so what we’ve established is
costs are going to grow
and they have grown they’ve continued to
grow
over the past several years from the
first day you registered
a domain name through the new round of
tlds in 2012 2014
so we kind of look at this and say the
status quo
is going to continue to drive cost
increases some believe more than others
so the status closed this rising line
and it may be a straight line but it
also may accelerate over time
as the bad guys continue to become more
efficient
and effective in how they try to
compromise your brand
and this view on brand tlds is saying
stop
do you really want to keep driving up
this cost
with having as the poll indicated may be
marginal improvement
but generally the same or worse so
that’s what we want to address
and that’s where we believe a brand top
level domain
strategy is really an elegant way to
address this problem
it’s a proprietary space it’s trusted
you can lock it down with security you
control everything
it’s massively scalable and offers
opportunities for innovation
so this slide is really to define a
strategy
and then we’ll talk about some numbers
so we’ve got our status quo costs
they’re increasing
constantly and will continue to do so if
you
drive no change today the strategy is to
say
start investing in your brand tld make
the market aware
that it’s your space and it’s secure and
the in customers can trust it
and as you do that you can begin to
reduce some of your status quo
costs over time so the end of these
arrows
is really five six years out so the
question is
where do you want to be would you rather
be out chasing domains and trying to
register stuff or would you rather have
a position
of trust with a lower cost structure
a controlled space more effective
communications
and engagement and build it of the
ability to improve
security and compliance
so what’s the business case to support
that so there’s a few factors here
first of all there’s an ability to
reduce your total cost of ownership over
your domains dns tls and brand
protection
you can also improve consumer trust you
can launch programs that are
differentiated in the market
to separate yourself from your
competitors
and with those you should be able to
drive top line revenue growth
and contribution margin increases
so with those views we did the math so i
developed
an roi calculator to look at this now
you’re going to have to get your uh your
glasses out and move closer to the
screen here for a few but
now we’re going to do the fun with math
so the calculator
sort of looks at a few things the first
thing it’s looking at
is domains dns and tls or ssl
certificates
what is the cost today how many domains
do you own
how many do you expect to register over
time what are the
vendor costs from registrars tls and
other vendors
manage dns and what are the internal
human resource
costs that often get missed in this
domains
in dns and tls it’s a pain and it takes
a lot of cycles
and then if you look at it on the status
quo
of how you’re going to increase that how
many new domains you’re going to
register
what’s the price inflation expected in
tlds
we know that dot com prices have been
approved to increase by seven percent
i think we should expect other
registries to also increment their fees
so if we look at that over a period of
five years
and then we look at if you drove a brand
tld strategy
and we’re now able to start calling some
of these domains
and reducing some of this activity you
could find some benefit
so we did that for this area in domains
dns and tls
we did it for brand protection we looked
at what are the services that you may be
employed right now how many udrps
you file every year how many domains
that you end up acquiring
and also what are the internal hr time
time consumptions of brand protection
specialist legal counsel
and we looked at it from a status quo
and a five year as well
we then of course looked at the other
side what are the costs to acquire your
brand
tld your zero is about capital it’s
acquiring an
asset so what are the costs to acquire
what are the cost to set that up
and then from year one through to year
five
we did it on a status quo where
you apply you hold it there are still
costs related to that with icann and
other fees
if you drove an impactful strategy what
would those costs be
now these are just scenarios but the
biggest driver
and costs here are really around the
people internally
and those you may contract to help you
drive this forward
then we combine that and we looked at
five-year status quo
dns brand protection and a brand tld
strategy as the status quo
or making a digital shift and we
calculate
what’s the total cost of ownership
impact in years one to five
it shows a difference of two two million
dollars
in year six to ten using the run rate
from year five
it’s three and a half million dollars
and presumably from year six to ten you
can make additional improvements as well
to make that even a more favorable
number
so those are the cost high but what
about the top line and the margins
are so we looked at different types of
programs you might
launch out there so in marketing
communications
what are the response rates you
typically get today in big ad spends
could you improve those ad spends on
channel management
you know particularly suitable for for
example
telecommunication companies that sell
their
their their cell phones through wireless
shops spread around the country could
you improve the management of that
and the digital presence that you’re
displaying there
social engagement we’ve seen evidence
already with early adopters that social
engagement can be improved fairly
significantly
now what are the branding value so if
you’re driving that top line you’re also
driving contribution margin because
there’s revenue
associated and gross margin associated
with those with those changes
so that’s sort of the overview of it i
thought what i’d do
is just do a quick sneak peek here and
show you the calculator
so this is sort of an overview page that
looks at the total cost of ownership and
the revenue generation
the graphs that relate to that and
other areas that you might be able to
drive forward in the future
so let’s just go into a couple of edits
so you can see how this works
so on domains dns and tls so this
this case assumes the company has 2 000
domains
so we’re going to change that number
from 2000 to another number
and you’ll see it reflected up here
above in the in the summary so let’s
change that for example
to a thousand to a thousand domains
you can see the changes if we change it
to ten thousand domains
you can see that your total cost of
ownership changes accordingly
and every time you own a domain you also
affect the amount of time
it takes for people to manage that
domain if you
own it you need to manage it and then we
go through a
number of other variables that can look
at enterprise dns
how many certificates you currently have
what’s the make up of those certificates
and the cost of those certificates
all of this data these assumptions would
come from your own business
to build the case that is relevant to
you
and then we’ve got people time how much
time does it take to register a domain
someone who requests a domain what about
an approver a second level approver a
domain manager an
it resource how much time do they spend
internally
and then managing the portfolio what
percentage of your portfolio do you
touch every year
and every time you touch it you have
human resource costs
so we we look at all these different
factors to generate
these this uh the status quo model
and a brand tld model to drive it
forward
and we’ve done that for brand protection
we’ve done it
for the brand tld
and we’ve also done it for the
innovation opportunity about how you
could drive
change for example if you spend 10
million dollars allocated to this for
promo.brand.com or perhaps it’s
brand.com forward slash
promotion can you improve that based on
trust and simplicity and clarity of
messaging
by using promo.brand and even if you
improve that by 10 percent
it can have a fairly significant change
to your organization
so i just wanted to share the mechanics
of it and then come back and share some
of the summary
so a brand with 2000 domains executes
the brand tld strategy
and over five years based on these
assumptions
they’re going to be able to reduce their
total cost of ownership
on their domains so status quo let’s say
you increased by five percent a year
with a brand tld you can start to reduce
or call that portfolio as you
make the market aware that it’s your dot
brand where they should be engaging with
you
and that will produce this chart so if
today you’re running at 347 000
there’s a potential to reduce that to
219 or even further
rather than driving it up with with 5
increases year over year
similar principle on brand protection
so if you do 10 ud rps a year your
average cost for udrp
is 13 000 you have a number of domains
you acquired an average cost of 2
000 you can start to see this start to
calculate and if this
increases just normally even you’re
going to drive more costs from brand
protection
over time and as we saw from the pool
you know there was a let’s see so i
guess it’s about 70 percent of people
said this would be just as effective or
less effective
turning that dial the other way starting
to reduce
you can start to reduce some of these
costs because you’re anchoring
everything on the trust
of your brand registry so a similar
principle
from 500 000 potential to reduce it to
340
in this scenario you’re never going to
get rid of brand protection ever it’s
always going to be a problem
unfortunately
but to be able to reduce it
significantly can make a big difference
in your organization so if you
accumulate those two together you get a
summary
from 844 driving to one point almost 1.3
or the ability to drive it down to 564.
layered into that you have the cost of
brand tld ownership
there’s the initial acquisition cost and
if you
if you sit on it and don’t do anything
with it it’s still going to cost you
somewhere in the range of 130 000
to 140 over time if you drive it
and allocate people and resources um
you know your cost goes up obviously
but if you notice the the trend line is
not as high because
once you own it the ability to scale it
becomes
pretty economical
so that’s the cost again so on the
summary side
on the top line and contribution margin
here here are a few areas so can you
increase
the response rate conversion rates by 10
percent
based on the better messaging the trust
authority of that
i believe you can and i think these
might be even conservative
channel management can you drive
improvements and top line
by being able to drive digital content
out to your channel that you control you
can measure
you can find out what’s working what’s
not working for some channel partners
and measure that analyze and adjust it
and apply those best practices across
your entire channel
social engagement we’ve seen cases where
brands have been able to drive a 30
increase in engagement and conversion
rate likewise would probably increase
there’s also just straight up branding
value your brand
your brand people inside the
organization of complex models to
justify their brand campaigns that don’t
generate
immediate revenue but if you’re able to
brand on this what kind of a value could
that have to you and this is all
thinking about these objectives hitting
these in a in a five year goal
so in year one you might get to fifteen
percent of goal
year three might be a sixty-five percent
of growth of goal
which generates these outcomes now this
is just a scenario for a brand
your unique condition would change this
material
materially so as a summary
with that data and that input you reduce
your total cost of ownership
on current status quo by 2 million
you’re going to spend about 2 million
dollars to drive your brand top level
domain
but you reduce your cost structure so
that the next six the
year six to ten you reduce your cost
structure by
3.5 million dollars and based on the
inputs we put
in inside the model it can you can start
to generate
or visualize what you can do in terms of
top line
and contribution margin
so there is more there’s a lot more
innovation opportunities that we see
that we see some brands doing and also
that are yet to be developed so if you
think about what those use cases might
be
it’s a customer dot brand what could you
deploy as a customer centered strategy
and
prove the value you’re delivering drive
brand affinity monthly recurring revenue
or efficiency and service delivery
what about agents a lot of businesses
market
engage through agent networks how could
that improve
some of the performance of the business
and those agents and the satisfaction of
those customers
in that type of a channel service dot
brand
we’re starting to hear about people
using it to create unique identifiers on
the dns
to improve service delivery and security
and related to security using your brand
tld to
anchor your entire dns network where you
can control
all the security settings automatically
by default with policies
you could drive out other types of use
cases to extend that network security
and trust
whether it’s supply chain iot cloud
edi and even considering in today’s
times
thinking about those remote workers so
there are other opportunities to drive
out
that really all depends on what your
business objectives are what kind of
business you run
every business is unique but at the same
time
almost every business has the same same
conditions
that they need to consider holistically
at the strategic level
so what are the business objectives
what are some of the new brand tld
capabilities
that you could drive inside your
organization
to improve digital experiences and
ensure trust in your market
and from those two reviews
now you can start to look at what are
the use cases that would be most
impactful for us
in our business and then how do we
develop an execution plan
on that to deliver it and drive this
paradigm shift
over the next five years
so that’s really about how to do a brand
tld strategy
so we’re going to talk about that on
another webinar
on july 23rd so hope you attend that as
well
so i hope you’ve also found that this
was informative
perhaps it delivers for you the missing
link to help you unravel this gordian
knot
to better demonstrate to your executives
the value
my experience so far when we communicate
the strategy
and the math the c levels are pretty
compelled
they get better brand security cost
savings
opportunities to innovate and drive
revenue and differentiate their
organization
it’s the third generation in digital
identity
on the dns i believe it’s gonna change
the world over the next five to ten
years and we’re seeing it happen more
and more
all the time so thanks very much i’d be
happy to answer any questions if anybody
has any
uh peter it’s martin thank you so much
for that i think
that certainly illustrates the
complexities of developing such models
i think especially um you know to tend
towards specific organizations
um so it needs that flexibility and
adaptability
to to meet those kind of demands so
do appreciate you running us through i
know it is at a high level but um
appreciate showing and illustrating that
for us today um we have got a couple of
questions so
um if you have got any questions do put
them into the
question panel um the first one i’ve got
here is
um so peter if we would like to create
our own business
case roi um how can we do that
yeah um well listen if you’d like to
reach out to me
i’d be happy to run you through it um
you know we can
we can look at some of the conditions
inside your enterprise and generate a
summary
on your specific business case so you
can respond to me
at peter authenticweb.com or through
martin
whatever might be easier for you no
obligation we’ll just
go through it and try to figure out what
works for your business
thanks peter and i know we will continue
to do some
uh work within the brand registry group
to um
move this along and and raise awareness
uh
and details amongst the membership so
i’ve also got a question
um i think this refers back to um
some of the indications of switching to
your
brand i’ve got a question here don’t you
think response rates will decline
initially
if the url doesn’t end in dot com
well i’m not sure about that i think
absolutely there’s a need for the public
to become aware that
what brand tlds are we you know it’s a
chicken and egg where
you know we need to educate the public
but i think as we
well whether we come through all the
different generations of types of
engagement technologies
social is a good example we humans are
pretty adapt
at adapting um so i don’t think it will
take long for people to to pick this up
the other side is it doesn’t necessarily
have to be an all
all in one or all or none i would be
driving
um test cases you know allocating a
limited amount of funds
and doing um you know a b testing
against different campaigns
and trying to understand that in the
beginning before huge dollars were spent
against it
i think as time progresses you know
you’re gonna see
um and we’re seeing it already a large
organization is starting to push these
out so
people will understand very quickly
people are pretty digitally savvy
especially this next generation that’s
coming up
okay um so
there’s more so they’re coming in um you
mentioned
the future webinar we’ll be covering
brand strategies so somebody’s asked
here
um will that webinar cover examples of
business objectives or
will that be touched upon now um so
i think just to clarify that what what
have you seen companies determine
are their objectives that can be
realized using domain names
and the dot brand name space yeah the
core of the uh
that webinar um something that i’ve used
for quite a while as a methodology
inside the organization i call it the
brand
brand registry introduction path but
we’ll look for some examples to make it
real
as well so if you come there you’ll see
a methodology
it’s just it’s a structured program um
that that sort of guide you through
different phases with the stage gate
and we’ll try to find some examples as
well to make that to make that real
okay thank you make a note on that one
um going back to
the cost elements um somebody’s asked
here
is uh can you clarify what are the
biggest
cost drivers in domains the dns and ssl
type um total cost of ownership
yeah um well you know everything’s a
function of the domains you own
oh i have some uh construction happening
next door it sounds like
so it’s all about the domains the number
of domains you own is really the
function
or the factor it’s often underestimated
that people spend
a lot of time managing these things if
you own it you need to manage it
so it’s not just the domain it’s the
people it’s the dns
edits the security reviews and
monitoring
and everything that goes along with that
apologize for the noise
okay i think we have
one more question
so um and i think i
i might have touched upon this in my
closing remark
um does this brand tld strategy
universally
to all businesses uh well universal is a
difficult assertion to make in anything
um you know and businesses are different
um but i think if you look at current
operations
challenges business objectives my view
is really that
any business objective that relates to
digital identity can be improved by
using a brand tld
it’s about that trust consumer trust is
critical
and we all live in this world where
we’re worried about clicking on
anything so if you can remove that and
create a trusted environment
because you can control it you can
establish security
security protocols and security settings
by policy
um i think you can apply to almost all
businesses but
you know there’s uh you know there’s
always a limit on everyone
okay uh thank you peter i think
i think that covers that we’ve got in
the queue if anybody else has got
a last burning question do feel free to
pop that into the
into the question box um otherwise
i’d say that we’re we’re coming to a
close on today’s webinar um
please do keep a watch out for details
of our upcoming
webinars which take place through july
and this is a last check
i think we’ve covered all of the
questions here so do appreciate your
participation
many thanks and look forward to seeing
you again at
our upcoming webinars thanks martin and
thanks everybody for taking the time
today