Scott Seitz
Scott Seitz is CEO and majority (90%) owner of dotgay LLC, a California corporation, and founder and owner of SPI Marketing, a leading LGBT agency with over 16 years of service on behalf of corporate and not-for-profit clients. SPI has planned the strategic entry or supported existing programs targeting gay and lesbian consumers for ABSOLUT Vodka, Diet Pepsi, North American Gay Amateur Athletic Association, LOGO, Aquafina, American and IBM, among other clients.
SPI Marketing has been LGBT agency of record for ABSOLUT since 1996; in 2009 it received a GLAAD (Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation) Outstanding Advertising award for its print work on behalf of ABSOLUT, considered the leading brand in the U.S. gay market. Scott has been listed in OUT100 and Instinct Men of the Year, and has been awarded recognition by several LGBT service organizations he has supported.
The SPI team, which has been looking for a way to give back to the community, views .gay as a vehicle for social entrepreneurship, with the potential to deliver tangible financial and strategic benefits to the global LGBT community. The team’s vision for .gay is based on 1) channeling 67% of the profits from the sale of .gay domain names to non-profit LGBT client organizations, and 2) safeguarding key community domains based on important generic keywords—e.g., hotel.gay, health.gay, marriage.gay and pride.gay—as communal resources to be operated for the mutual benefit of LGBT constituents: the service and non-profit community, business community, advertisers and media, plus a diverse range of individuals and emerging community groups.
A graduate of Michigan State University with a BA in Chemistry and a BS in Packaging Engineering, Scott honed his business, technology and marketing acumen at Kodak and Pepsi, working in a range of disciplines including business-to-business sales, operations, distribution, new product introductions, quality control, reengineering, brand and consumer marketing. Recognizing that maximizing affinity with gay consumers required highly specialized marketing communications strategies, he founded SPI Marketing in 1996.
Active in community service, Scott has served on the Board of Governors of Bread & Roses, a Connecticut AIDS service organization, Stonewall speaker bureau, and is a founding board member of Honoring Our Journey, a men’s spiritual group. Active in the First Congregational Church of Norwalk, he has provided expertise to a variety of other community organizations and businesses. Scott lives with his partner of 15 years on the Connecticut coastline.
Jamie Baxter joined the dotgay LLC team in January 2011 as the Vice President of Marketing, jumping into the ICANN world and the new gTLD program with both feet from day one. Inspired by CEO Scott Seitz’s community-based approach to creating the .gay TLD, the move to join a passionate team of LGBT advocates was a natural fit. As the key community liaison for the .gay initiative, Jamie is responsible for outreach and communication, application and policy preparation, as well as garnering endorsements and sponsorships from LGBT organizations around the globe.
David Gudelunas, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Communication and Director of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut. He received his MA and Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania and his BA is from the University of San Francisco. Gudelunas researches and teaches in the areas of critical and cultural studies; gender, sexuality and communication; media history; digital media and communication industries. He is the author of “Confidential to America: Newspaper Advice Columns and Sexual Education” from Transaction Publishers (2008) and is widely published in the areas of popular communication, new media as well as the intersections of sexuality and communication.
Alan oversees programming and content management. Before joining the company, Alan co-founded Bunyip Information Systems, Inc., where he created the Archie(R) system, the Internet’s first search engine. A native of Barbados who holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer Science from McGill University, he lectures and speaks at conferences around the world on topics relating to Internet information systems and the impact of the Internet on society. Alan has chaired the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working groups on Internet Anonymous FTP Archives (IAFA) and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URLs, URNs and URCs), as well having served on advisory boards for the National Science Foundation and other agencies.
