Verizon Wireless® and ad agency McGarryBowen have rolled out a catchy TV commercial which has just about everything from a building to a parking meter transforming into a transmitter as a person with a cell phone walks around. The point of the commercial is that Verizon offers a wide range solid signal strength.

The tag line used is:

It is your signal. It is your world. And it is your time to rule the air.

The TV ad finished showing RuleTheAir.com to further Verizon’s message online. Upon arriving at the site RuleTheAir.com, the domain name forwards to http://phones.verizonwireless.com/ruletheair/#/landing

This allows easy ad tracking for Verizon (notice the ruletheair in the URL) to see how the ad is doing, while also directing visitors of the ad to the specific page Verizon wishes.

I have mentioned countless times that I am not a huge fan of domain forwarding with advertised domains, because it really only covers the direct navigation users and will often force the company to use paid advertising to match the search terms of the domain name used. RuleTheAir.com was first registered in March of 2010 and would have given Verizon plenty enough time to get the domain name ranking for the matching term, but since the domain simply forwards to Verizon’s main site, search engines are less likely to index any pages for the domain.

An option that companies have to counter act a domain forward and help with search engine rankings is to set up page titles, meta descriptions and the content on the specific page to match the domain name and tag line to match the ad. This is often over looked but Verizon did a pretty good job at this.

The bad thing, they are getting out ranked AND they are paying for the advertising. Using the exact match domain as a minisite, would very likely have them ranked #1 and it would be the first thing search engine users would see. Similar search results for ruletheair and ruletheair.com .

Another thing that I noticed, RuleTheAir.com is registered by McGarryBowen (ad agency) and not Verizon. It is always best to own your domain name, no questions asked. Verizon is paying for the ad, they should own the domain. It appears the ad agency also did a cover buy and purchased all the major TLD’s like .net, .org, .info, biz and .us .

It could be a case where the ad agency owned the domain name already and Verizon is "leasing" the domain but not likely.

RuleTheAir.com is a make sense, catchy and easy to spell domain name and was a good choice for the ad! Nobodies perfect, but this ad likely could have been near perfect if the domain was used on a stand alone site and Verizon had ownership of the domain.