Valley PR Blog

GoDaddy’s Super Bowl ad play - shrewd or stale?

By Angelo Fernando on January 26th, 2008 In Hype!

If the same”controversial” story comes back every single year, does it constitute news?

GoDaddy’s much anticipated (um, predictable) story of having several Super Bowl ads rejected strikes me as a way of proving (a) how desperate the media has to be to bite a story like this, or (b) how shrewdly they positioned this, knowing it would be deja vu to the media.

Consider these stories:

Cleaner ad to air during Super Bowl - Jan 2008
GoDaddy Beats Censors - Feb 2006
GoDaddy ad stalled by censors: Dec 2005

Not hard to predict this approach, but at which point does it become old? AdRants suggests it may be a play to get people to go watch the so-called banned spots that were never intentioned to run during Super Bowl. One reader rightly commented on the story at AZCentral that “journalists are such tools.”

Are they?

Comments

The tactic is played out. It’s an eye-roller. The first year, it worked great, because it probably wasn’t intentional. In the second year, an encore — after millions of dollars of free international press — was understandable.

Now it’s just silly. They deliberately game the ad to fail the censors and appeal to everyone due to reverse psychology. But when the hype is manufactured and we then watch the end result on Super Bowl (oops - “Big Game”) Sunday and wonder “Is that it?”…it doesn’t help their branding. Meanwhile, Go Daddy has lined up great celebrity endorsements (Chad Johnson, Amanda Beard, etc.) and can’t figure out how to use them any other way.

We just posted our 4th annual study of how well super bowl advertisers integrated online and offline advertising - we’ll be writing more about this on our blog, but the preliminary findings are already up on our site: Super Bowl XLII Scorecard.

[...] with this year’s ad, Go Daddy proved what we’ve been saying all along: its advertising strategy is eroding its brand equity. Go Daddy is becoming “the brand that [...]

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