Go Daddy Preps New Super Bowl SpotBy Justin Lee, theWHIR.com
January 9, 2007 — (WEB HOST INDUSTRY REVIEW) — After a series of risqué Super Bowl television spots featuring a scantily-clad model, Web hosting industry watchers and fans of football are sure that Web host and domain registrar Go Daddy (godaddy.com) isn’t shy when it comes to controversy.
The company’s first Super Bowl advertisement ran during Super Bowl XXXIX in 2005, famously spoofing the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” incident of the previous year’s halftime show. In the ad, buxom Go Daddy girl Candice Michelle appears before a broadcast censorship committee, where the strap of her tank top comes loose.
Such racy content would play an integral role in a continuing series of slapstick-driven Go Daddy advertisements, and would become a deciding factor in ABC’s decision to reject 13 initial ad submissions leading up to last year’s Super Bowl ad before finally approving the Web host’s 14th submission.
And while the advertisements have been criticized for their overtly sexual nature, they have also proved the old sex sells adage. Millions flocked to Go Daddy’s Web site to view the commercial for weeks following the 2005 Super Bowl, resulting in a 1573 percent increase in Internet activity, according to comScore Networks.
However, the company faced criticism the following year when it began posting clips of the ad submissions on its Web site, as each was rejected by ABC.
Critics accused Go Daddy and its founder and CEO, Bob Parsons, of a crass attempt to draw free publicity through the move. Parsons denies this, affirming that it only began making the rejected submissions available when it felt the chances of ABC airing the advertisement diminishing.
And the criticism itself may be moot, since the original Go Daddy Super Bowl ad coincided almost directly with the company’s meteoric climb to become the world’s largest domain registrar and Web hosting provider.
“People always take shots at the industry leader,” says Parsons. “We’re the industry leader and not at all by a small amount, but a huge amount. And it’s because we do a lot of things right. One of the things we do right is we do advertising that gets peoples attention. I think everybody needs critics and that’s a healthy thing. But I have no regrets over last year’s advertising.”
This year, says Parsons, the company is not courting controversy, though controversy may have helped the company reach its current heights.
This time around, Go Daddy has hired a Milwaukee advertising agency to help it work out the concept for this year’s Super Bowl campaign. The company has purchased three slots in the Super Bowl broadcast, which will air February 4 from Miami, Florida. So far, the agency has brainstormed a variety of ideas, says Parsons – some of which the company has chosen to produce.
“The concept is still up in the air,” says Bob Parson, founder and CEO of Go Daddy. “We’ve shot three ads so far. [We] submitted one to CBS – that was rejected. Two of them have already been produced, one is pretty much been edited – that will be submitted to ABC in the next day or so – and the other one we just shot yesterday.”
The seven-figure budgeted ad will once again feature the original “Go Daddy Girl” Candice Michelle, along with race car driver and new Go Daddy spokesperson Danica Patrick, the Teutul family of television’s American Chopper fame, motorcycle drag-racer Valerie Thompson, as well as Diggnation’s Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht and GeekBriefTV’s Cali Lewis.
So far, Parsons says CBS has already rejected its first submission for the ad, citing that the network was “not comfortable with the content of the commercial”.
Despite the murky details of the project, Go Daddy’s Super Bowl XLI commercial has at least one certainty: it will have its share of critics. Adweek (adweek.com) columnist Barbara Lippert called last year’s Go Daddy Super Bowl advertisement “the lowest of the low”, a “$5 million vanity project” made by “a bunch of cliché-smarmy boy executives rehashing the wonder of last year’s Go Daddy commercial”.
Parsons shrugs this off, claiming instead that he welcomed the critique with open arms. “I was delighted to read that,” says Parsons, “because the first thing that people do when they see that mention – what are they going to do? They’re going to look up my ad.”
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