If you’ve ever visited or spoken to someone from Australia, there is a good chance you’ve heard of Australian Rules Football. Those who are followers of Australia’s most popular football code are often politely described as ‘fanatical’, with hundreds of thousands of followers attending games each weekend during the southern hemisphere winter.

The game is run by the Australian Football League (AFL) who acquired the .afl extension in 2012 and have become one of the more prolific and trailblazing users of their .brand Top Level Domain (TLD). For this year’s finals series, the AFL used www.finals.afl to promote the games and associated events, including the Grand Final which had attendance of over 100,000 people.

Attendees for the finals series games alone are over 700,000 people. Apart from visibility to those attending the games, www.finals.afl was exposed to millions via ads on television, radio, social media, and out-of-home advertising.

As a long-time advocate for the .brand movement, this was really impressive to witness. Even more impressive was the signage inside and outside the stadiums that contained the domain name—it was absolutely everywhere and those of you in the industry will know what I mean when I say that this was an opportunity to show my family what I actually do for a job!

When Amazon ran its ‘Build-on’ campaign using www.buildon.aws in a campaign that included ads in airports, train stations and other outdoor media, we thought that was pretty impressive. Similarly with the French train system manager SNCF using www.oui.sncf as its new customer portal for tickets and assistance.

One other interesting aspect of the campaign was the use of “finals-dot-afl” in radio advertising. Those who heard the ad reported how natural it sounded in the context of the rest of the script, helping to reinforce the message and provide an easy to remember call to action.

We may never be able to prove one way or another which .brand domain has been placed in front of the public the most times. One thing is for sure though, finals.afl enjoyed millions of impressions in front of a die-hard audience over this four week period and for now, I think it’s OK to give it the cheeky interim title of ‘most publicized .brand domain name to date’.

Let’s see how long it takes for a global brand to become the challenger!!