GoDaddy Ads?

Superbowl commercials are great. For the first time in the season instead of flipping the channels to pass the time between media timeouts or challenged plays, ad agencies showcase their utmost creative work. The spots can range from a quick fifteen-second ad to Chrysler’s memorable 2011 Super Bowl ad featuring Eminem that ran for over two minutes.

GoDaddy.com, an online domain registration website, has certainly captured the attention of the viewers in the most recent years. In the past, the advertisements have featured sexy female cops performing strip teases on top of cars, sexy female news anchors performing strip teases on top of a coffee tables…I think you’re starting to see the trend. They even satire their own creative approach. In one commercial a woman appeals in front of a congressional hearing, she was trying to argue that her commercial shouldn’t be censored —while also trying to keep her shirt from falling off as she twirled around…all in the context of a commercial.

When I was a kid, we used to talk about the Super Bowl commercials Monday morning in homeroom before the teacher arrived. I was 12 years old in 2007 during Super Bowl XLI when GoDaddy featured over a dozen women in tiny white tank tops inside a conference room being sprayed with champaign by a midget.

 My friends and I had no idea what GoDaddy actually was. We could see two things in these commercials through our virginal eyes: breasts, and a bumper at the end of the skit prompting a website. We all thought GoDaddy was a PORN site. I’m not kidding you, some boys even defended that they had gone on the website firsthand and watched porn.  When I look back at it, they probably had gone on the website and confused unaired advertisements for porn.  We didn’t know anything about coding, domain purchasing, or website building, we took it for exactly what we saw on the TV during Superbowl Commercials.

This is the problem.  GoDaddy’s commercials were so objectifying of women that the consumer couldn’t associate the brand with their actual product.  Sex is was only thing that they were selling. Prior to 2013, there was hardly any information in the TV spots that displayed their services or capabilities.  Take it through the eyes of a twelve-year-old boy, a potential customer who could use GoDaddy as a platform because he can’t code or form his own domain. The ads didn’t make sense —it wasn’t a good campaign.

Eventually GoDaddy realized that their brand was heading in the wrong direction. So in mid-2012, they hired a new agency Deutcsch New York. “We’ve matured. We’ve evolved,” CMO Barb Rechterman said in a statement. “Our new brand of Super Bowl commercials will make it crystal clear what we do and who we stand for.” Their first new era ad was the all too memorable close up of a make out between Bar Rafaeli (the sexy aspect of GoDaddy) and Jesse Heiman (the nerdy tech side of the service). The advertisement certainly kept the shock and awe hopes that they were looking for and as the CMO stated, it made it crystal clear what the business offers.

If you think that there is too much censorship in today’s media, that’s beside the point. GoDaddy was so explicit with using sex appeal in their advertisements, that the rhetoric overpowered the very product that they were trying to sell. Their most recent commercial has proved that GoDaddy has matured as a brand. The 2014 Super Bowl featured a real woman who quit her real job as an engineer on live TV, to pursue her passion of putting on children’s puppet shows. GoDaddy’s website empowered her with the platform to do this. Anyone can sell sex appeal; GoDaddy’s 2014 Superbowl campaign truly impressed me.  Not only did they fully showcase what they do as a company, they featured a real woman as an entrepreneur. Props to GoDaddy.

-Matt Connelly

Read more at: http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/go-daddy-promises-no-more-sleazy-super-bowl-ads-153518

Watch Gwen quit her job here http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gf0vzLgF-OI