After much deliberation ICANN finally approved the New TLD Program at a meeting in Singapore last month. The application period does not open until January 2012 however and the rest of 2011 has been set aside for a communication period to increase global awareness of the New TLDs.

ICANN have now released requests for proposals to help them achieve their goal of educating the masses on the New TLDs over the coming months. The contract will go to an advertising agency which will be in charge of working with ICANN to develop, implement and measure the success of a global advertising campaign. In the PDF documentation published on the ICANN website it states that the successful campaign must create “buzz” and capture peoples’ imaginations. It also needs to be more than just an explanation of how the New TLD program will work, and the winning proposal needs to get people thinking about this ground breaking change and how their communities and organizations may benefit from it.

The target audience of the campaign is divided into two main groups, potential applicants, and those who may not necessarily apply but still need to know about the New TLD program. Later stages of the campaign will then reach out to consumers and end users.

The contract to increase the awareness of the New TLD program is worth $750,000, which is surprisingly little, considering each individual application fee comes in at $185,000. ICANN have also made the decision to set aside considerably more for any legal implications following New TLD applications, so the figure for advertising has come as a surprise.

It might seem like a lot to you and me, but $750k in the advertising world isn’t a large sum, and the campaign to increase awareness will need to be multinational and in many different languages in order to be truly successful. The planned outreach areas are currently Africa, Asia (including the Middle East), Europe, Latin America, and North America and it will be translated into the six official languages of the United Nations – Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish.

It is thought that most of the awareness for these domains so far has come from non- advertising, such as press and news articles and will no doubt continue to do so, with Twitter and Google searches having increased dramatically for “ICANN” since the New TLD program was approved last month.

ICANN are inviting potential Ad Agencies to get in touch with their proposals no later than the 13th July, stating that all late expressions of interest will be ignored and automatically rejected. We’ll just have to wait and see who wins the contract…

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