Booking.com wins the biggest advertising goof of 2016 with Booking.yeah

booking-yeah

I’m going to keep this short because, honestly, I don’t think it’s hard to see the huge misstep by Booking.com in their latest advertising campaign. It will likely go down in history as one of the biggest misses an advertising agency could make, but it happened, and in some cases, it’s still airing somehow.

With the launch of tons of new gTLDs from .CLUB to .GURU, .ATTORNEY to .XYZ consumers are still trying to wrap their head around all the new domain extensions. It’s safe to say that most people don’t know all the different new domain extensions that have launched over the last couple of years. Did you know there was a .HOLDINGS? What about a .GDN?

With so many new domain names extensions out there, one that doesn’t exist is .YEAH. Which is why it’s still so baffling that in a sea of new potential domain extensions, Bookings.com, a company with a killer domain name – somehow thought it would be a good idea to redirect a huge amount of traffic from a super-expensive advertising campaign…to a Google search for booking.yeah.

booking-yeah-google

It’s a huge miss and it’s driving a TON of traffic to the #1 result in Google for this search – bookingyeah.co.uk, which looks like this:

booking-yeah-uk

Honestly, is it just me or is this crazy? How did this happen? With so many new domain extensions to brand around, how did Bookings.com divert traffic from a fantastic, easy-to-remember .COM, and instead send traffic to a non-existent domain extension that yields a Google search to a site with a blank white page with five links?

It might just be one of the biggest marketing mistakes of all time. What do you think?

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton