For today’s old website check, we’re focusing on a campaign Hyundai ran in late 2007.

Instead of showing flashy cars doing amazing driving along picturesque roads, Hyundai went with a more cerebral ad campaign. That’s actually the whole point of the ads: Hyundai wants you to “Think about it” by going to thinkaboutit.com.

Or is that think-about-it.com? Well, one ad (featuring a statue of a young person holding the face of an old man) had the hyphens while this one, with the Earth against a black background, didn’t:

Each has a block of text in the upper left that ends in an incomplete hyphenated word. We’re supposed to go to the website to find out the rest of the story.

But that’s not really feasible some 13 years later.

The first site I tried was the one without dashes — thinkaboutit.com.

Well, that is now somebody’s personal blog page. Sort of. It looks like the owner moved and now thinkaboutit.com suggests clicking over to the owner’s new site:

Not only did the content on that personal blog not really interest me, it looks like the owner hasn’t updated the site in more than a decade (just like Hyundai’s campaign).

Meanwhile it looks like think-about-it.com (the one with the dashes) directed the viewer to a subsection of hyundaiusa.com back in the day.

We know this because going to think-about-it.com now takes you to a Hyundai page-not-found page:

The fact that this primary domain still calls up Hyundai’s site means the company still owns the domain (good for them!). They likely had it point to a site section (I have some note to myself that it may have redirected to hyundaiusa.com/thinkaboutit). The fact that the redirect still exists is excellent — there’s an opportunity for the company to point the URL to something useful.

Go for it, Hyundai. You can do it! Do something useful!