Omtzigt's party name clashes with Naarden marketing company's acronym
The marketing firm NSC based in Naarden shares an acronym with the newly founded political party of Pieter Omtzigt. This has driven a significant surge in website traffic as people looking for details about the political party land on the firm's site, the managing director of the company told NH Nieuws on Monday.
This Sunday, Pieter Omtzigt announced he will participate in the parliamentary election on November 22 under his newly established party, Nieuw Sociaal Contract, translated to 'New Social Contract' in English. He announced his decision in an interview with the Twente newspaper Tubantia. “We have been preparing for a while,’ he told the newspaper. He founded the party on Saturday.
However, it looks like Omtzigt might have missed a crucial detail in his preparation. The acronym of his party matches that of the Naarden-based marketing firm "New Sales Company." Their domain is nsc.nl. "Of course we saw immediately that it was the same letters," said to NH Nieuws Thomas Brouwers, the Managing director of the company.
While Omtzigt seems to have chosen the domain nieuwsociaalcontract.nl, thousands mistakenly searched for nsc.nl and ended up on the company’s website. "We usually see around a hundred visitors daily, but just this morning we had 2,500," Brouwers noted.
For the marketing firm, this unintentional mix-up is a golden opportunity. "They can always call us for marketing services, in a way, we already have a kind of partnership,” Brouwers said jokingly.
Should Omtzigt wish to secure the domain, the price tag could be high. Brouwers hinted at a figure “with five zeros” during an interview on NPO3 on Monday. As a point of reference, NPO spent 100,000 euros in 2012 to acquire the domain npo.nl, previously owned by the Dutch Pigeon Organization.
It remains to be seen whether Omtzigt will have the time and the resources to secure the domain, as there is a lof of work to be done. He founded the party on Saturday, and while the program is complete, the list of candidates is not yet. He said he will open a website for people to apply. In a recent poll, he got 46 parliamentary seats if he participated.
Omtzigt was a CDA parliamentarian for a long time, but he left the party two years ago after a heated conflict. Since then, he has been a one-man faction in the Tweede Kamer. The 49-year-old man built up a reputation as a tenacious parliamentarian. Together with Renske Leijten of the SP, Omtzigt played a leading role in exposing the benefits scandal. During the crisis within the CDA, he was at home with burnout for several months. Criticism of Omtzigt includes the reproach that he always wants to investigate everything and does not make decisions.
