New Go Daddy Ads, The Tastelessness Arms Race

Bob Parsons excitedly reported in a blog posting that Go Daddy has issued a pair of new television ads, both featuring the ever-present "Go Daddy Girl" Candice Michelle.

For anybody who's not quite up to speed, Michelle is the well-endowed model from the original Go Daddy Super Bowl ad that caused such a controversy almost two years ago.

Go Daddy Productions, the company Go Daddy started after the original advertising project to create its own ads, delivers more of the same with the new spots. Michelle shows up unexpectedly at an event (a golf game; the christening of a bizarrely named boat), frolics suggestively and somehow ends up soaking wet.

The ads themselves didn't really do anything for me - they fall a little short of each of their goals of being titillating, funny or offensive. But they do pose a couple of interesting questions. Most notably, how do you market domain names to the mass audience?

With each of these new ads, it becomes clearer that Go Daddy is trying to recapture what it had with the original Super Bowl ad. And it seems more likely that what Go Daddy really craves is the controversy.

It's an understandable temptation, since the original ad did coincide with the company's rise to dominance, and marked the beginning of the particular cult of personality Go Daddy has built up around Parsons.

In the title of his post, Parsons writes "I get accused of going too far - again." But in the post itself, he never explains who accused him of going too far, or when, or how. Having seen the ads, I suspect the answer is "nobody," or that Parsons is referring more specifically to the need for Go Daddy to edit out certain parts of the "internet only versions" from the versions destined for TV. But there's a pretty big gap between basic television broadcast standards and real controversy.

But then Web hosts seem to be convinced controversy will win them customers, from C I Host with its tattooed "human billboards" to Globat with its sex-taping pitchman. It's a tough business to be the most tasteless.

The thing I'm left wondering is how effective these tactics really are at winning over customers. Sure, they may get attention, but does meeting some lunatic with "C I Host" tattooed on his head make the average person any more likely to need a Web site?

Interestingly, buried amid the mayhem of Go Daddy's new "Golf" ad is a real effort at a compelling argument for domains to the mass market. The pitch is that "life is full of dot-com moments," and it is at those moments, of course, that we ought to turn to Go Daddy.

That might be true. I'd really be interested to know for sure how much of Go Daddy's appeal comes from its marketing and how much from the fact that it charges as little as $2 for a domain.

Of course, if somebody has a better idea than Go Daddy about how to sell domain names, they're clearly not putting it into practice, because Go Daddy is definitely selling more domains than them, whomever they are.

Also, I think it's cool that the Bob Parsons' brother's advice (near the bottom of the blog post) is a line from a Trooper song. Irrelevant, perhaps, but it's not often this line of work affords an opportunity to mention Canadian classic rock. I relish such opportunities.

Tags: go daddy, advertising, candice michelle, controversy