Doug Strachan
President
SST: Strachan Strategic Thinking
1755 North Brown Rd., Suite 200
Lawrenceville, GA 30043

Situation

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For many years, the City of Atlanta Department of Aviation's (DOA) domain was the unwieldy www.atlanta-airport.com. Employee email convention was first _name.last _name@atlanta-airport.com, which was even more difficult, requiring countless instances of repeating the domain numerous times to stakeholders interested in conversing with staff via email. Also difficult to quantify was the number of times important emails failed to reach their recipients due to confusion pertaining to the overly-long, hyphenated domain.

 

Task

Find an affordable way to convince Philips to let DOA have the domain. Satisfy procurement and other City of Atlanta legal requirements.

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Action

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Philips asked for $200k for the domain transfer. We let Philips know that we had those funds, but that we had something better to offer them. What is better than money, they inquired?

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Prior to that conversation, we had anticipated potential internal opposition to spending a large amount of money on acquiring the domain, should Philips acquiesce to its transfer. Therefore, we imagined a barter agreement that would involve no cash, but instead something that would be equally valuable to Philips, but was in surplus from our vantage point.

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As we controlled six minutes of CNN Airport Channel (CNN) "inserts" per hour, we asked CNN if we could trade a minute per hour, 18 hours daily, for six months. Although we were contractually prohibited from "selling" inserts in a way that would compete with CNN's ability to monetize the channel via advertisement, CNN saw that our pursuit of ATL.com was to better serve our customers and agreed to the deal.

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Another necessary consideration was procurement. The City of Atlanta's (City) Department of Procurement has a twofold mission: 1) ensure the lowest sustainable prices for goods and services; and 2) ensure fair access to City business. Soon, we obtained a special procurement for zero dollars, memorializing the no-cash deal we had crafted with the only vendor capable of transferring the domain.

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Results

 

Philips transferred the domain to DOA on October 31, 2014. The deal we cut saved DOA $200k. Philips created, at its own expense, a 60-second video on its commitment to innovation, and got it on the CNN Airport Channel in front of an important demographic, 18 times a day, for six months. They were delighted.

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Later, DOA rebranded its website with an ATL.com theme, and finally changed those extra long emails to a much more palatable first_name.last_name@atl.com. Few are the times staff has to repeat the email anymore; gone is the domain-confusing email that could result in important messages never reaching their destinations!

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