It was just a couple of weeks ago that we looked at the many permutations of Nissan’s online identity (since they can’t have Nissan.com). Today, we look at Nissan’s spin-off brand, Infiniti, and the different online identities the brand has seen.

The first ad we’ll look at today used a lot of red and orange ink in an April 1997 magazine:

If you don’t remember the Infiniti QX4, you’re in good company. Few people do. As one of Infiniti’s earlier offerings, this was basically just a slightly fancier Nissan. In this case, the QX4 was just a Nissan Pathfinder with a slightly different grille and lighting and badging. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, just not something all that unique.

And, yes, the ad really is that orangey/reddish color. It hurts my eyes a bit, but maybe I see that sky and can only think of the recent wildfires in California.

Anyway, the white font at the bottom of the screen, laid over the quaint cobblestone street, proudly proclaims that Infiniti is on the Internet at infinitimotors.com:

That URL is a bit of a mouthful but it’s at least descriptive and accurate.

But is it still alive?

Ooooh… no.

Infinitimotors.com returns a “This site can’t be reached” error these days. That’s particularly sad since whois.com shows that the site is still owned by Nissan North America.

Color me disappointed.

Okay, let’s dry our tears and move on to the next ad on the list, from February 1998. This was actually an 8-page spread promoting the entire Infiniti lineup:

The ad above focuses on Infiniti’s racing prowess. I suppose they’ve had a few engines in racing series over the years, and they maybe won a few awards. But we’ve seen these kinds of ads before and we’ll see more in the future.

Buried on the last page of the spread are a couple of references to infiniti-usa.com. This is, of course, a departure from the infinitimotors.com URL we saw just a moment ago.

So where does this new, hyphenated, URL go today?

Ugh. Strike two!

And just as with the failure earlier in this post, we can easily see that infiniti-usa.com is still owned by Nissan.

I like the expression, “once a mistake, twice a habit.” And this kind of weak web management is definitely becoming a habit with Nissan.

So all of that leads us to the third and final ad of this excursion.

This ad from February 2005 suggests that if you drive an Infiniti G35 for your daily commute, you’ll forget about all the boring bits between leaving and arriving.

I, for one, like to be fully conscious and aware of my driving endeavors, regardless of how routine they may seem. But, then again, I don’t drive an Infiniti – perhaps Infiniti drivers might want to forget the experience. I don’t know.

What I do know is that the very blurry blue ad above promotes the much simpler website Infiniti.com.

At last! Infiniti has landed on a nice and simple URL. It only took them a few years. Maybe there were other, older ads that also referenced Infiniti.com but I didn’t find any.

Surely, this simple, more elegant URL still persists today, yes?

Okay! Well, that’s not bad, actually.

These days, Infiniti.com takes viewers to a page where they can pick their local region from a global list – something that’s not uncommon with global brands. There must be some location identification on the site (probably by IP Address) because every time I go to Infiniti.com, the browser takes me to InfintiUSA.com, which is the company’s current site for U.S. marketing.

So, I suppose one out of three old URLs isn’t terrible. But it isn’t great either. Infiniti (and Nissan) can do better.