GoDaddy Super Bowl Follow-Up: What to do if You’re Danica Patrick
Our post yesterday about the embarrassingly bad GoDaddy Super Bowl campaign using Danica Patrick created quite a stir. You’ll recall that GoDaddy has generated monumental amounts of awareness for their brand by using sexually-gratuitous commercials for years and years.
Despite the terrible missteps Danica Patrick has made by over-promoting her sexual appeal, there is still hope to refurbish her brand.
Interestingly enough, the customer service at GoDaddy is top-notch and best-of-class. We should know — we use them for our hosting service! Every time we call them, they’re extremely well-trained and excellent with follow-through.
Which is why it’s even more important that they abandon their current approach to marketing. Hey, GoDaddy — There’s this thing called a BRAND. And when you tarnish your brand by creating horrible commercials, you do long-term damage to the value of your company and the self-esteem of your staff.
Which brings us full-circle — what should Danica Patrick do once she comes to her senses about being affiliated with these terrible GoDaddy commercials?
Here’s what:
- Fire your agent. If they’re any good, they would have said, “Danica, for the long-term growth of your brand, you shouldn’t be affiliated with the kind of commercials that GoDaddy runs.”
- Reposition yourself. Get a good PR agent. Get affiliated with a charity. And write a tell-all book on how you were misguided in your youth and how you went over-the-top with the whole sex thing.
- Get in touch with middle America. Oh, sure. Middle America is filled with aging men who find you beautiful. (Hell, I’m one of them.) But that doesn’t mean you should focus your appeal on the lowest common denominator. Be a leader — show us that you have brains AND beauty.
- Connect with a charity. You’ll make more money in the long-run if your brand is affiliated with the more positive side of human nature than the negative side. Find a charity you love. Spend 20% of your time working with that charity. And do some good for humanity.
Full disclosure. In the interest of not coming across as a holier-than-though nut job, I would like to disclose the following:
- I have looked at a Playboy magazine.
- Strike that — I’ve looked at lots of Playboy magazines.
- I drank beer before the legal drinking age.
- I had pre-marital sex.
So I’m not coming at this from a blindly-conservative point-of-view. I’m coming at it from the point-of-view of someone who has seen a few things in his life and is hoping that those experiences can benefit Ms. Patrick and the good employees at GoDaddy.
Here are the key points I’d like you to remember:
- GoDaddy is doing long-term damage to their brand. Their customer service and employee spirit are too important to continue running commercials that appeal to 13 year-old boys and over-the-hill men. We hope they see the light.
- Danica Patrick is doing long-term damage to her brand. Hey, Danica. Want to be around past the age of 30? Then start positioning yourself as a smart, talented sports figure who also happens to be beautiful. You’ll make even more money that way.
- Some things are bigger than the almighty dollar. Sure, it’s good to make tons of money. But at the end of the day, wouldn’t you rather be known for making a positive impact on society rather than a negative one? Hopefully, GoDaddy and Danica Patrick will snap out of it and start being a positive force instead of a negative force.
See you again soon. Assuming GoDaddy doesn’t cancel our hosting account.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I am 15 years old, and after seeing GoDaddy’s commercials I decided to go with another company for both my hosting and all of my domains. I cannot trust a company who is using sex as an icon for a product which has little connection with each other. I would not trust a porn site with my website, so now, why should I trust something like GoDaddy. They should realize that there is a VERY large population of web designers, developers, and owners that are my age and younger. They are way off on their target audience, unless they are trying to increase the number of porn sites out there. I agree with this posting, and GoDaddy should turn things around before they completely trash their company.
Ryan — Your parents should be proud of you. Not only are you an admirable kid, but you can write very well, too.
Good job! I’m going to Tweet about this right now so that people know there are bright, articulate, young web designers out there who stand by their values.
Best,
Jamie Turner
Danica should focus on her “sport”. She’s terrible at it.
Hi, ODG. I’m not well-versed enough on NASCAR to know if she’s terrible at it, but I can say that I’ve heard others say the same thing.
I agree that the GoDaddy commercials are always nauseating. The worst was last year (or maybe the year before?) when the commercial featured a glimpse into GoDaddy’s marketing department—which was staffed, of course, by some really nutty, rule-breaking, partiers. Yechh.
There were a lot of silly superbowl ads, which is to be expected. But, even the careerbuilder.com ad with all the men in their tighty whities wasn’t as despicable a s the GoDaddy.com ad-yuck.
As a woman, I am pretty sick of poor/mediocre female athletes leveraging their looks for endorsements, rather than their sport.
Ex: Danice Patrick and Anna Kournikova
Jeez, I just wish they were decent at their profession-that would make it less distasteful for me.
So, am I saying that levering their looks is okay as long as they are good at their sport? Yeah, maybe. At least they would be celebrated for their talent, as well as their, um, genes. It’s a bit like “dress up” when there isn’t much talent there to speak of.
I also personally don’t think Danica Patrick is such a knockout and if she wasn’t a race car driver, she would’ve never gotten all the attention for her looks. It’s primarily b/c she works in a male-dominated profession. I concede Kournikova is pretty striking, and I am sure those tennis skirts don’t hurt, either.
Where are the female golf professionals and their endorsements? LOL. I agree Jamie-fire that agent, do something for charity-dump the Hooters-like 90’s tank tops and work on driving :)
Great topic! I’ve only just discovered your blog (love what I’ve seen so far) and wanted to leave a comment because I’ve debated this with friends about the continued direction of Go Daddy ads.
Obviously, Bob Parsons launched the sexually-gratuitous Go Daddy campaign to break from the pack as a startup and Danica Patrick signed-on a few years later for money. What I don’t understand is why you and thousands of others who claim not to like the ads, support them with your economic vote? You might like their customer support, but unless you were part of Go Daddy’s beta team…the ads existed when you signed-on.
Did you expect them to change once they were paid for it? As long as Bob’s company continues to grow, he’ll keep pumping out the same lame ads because (a) he’s running a business, and (b) it appears to be working.
For the record, I’ve used 4 hosting companies and Go Daddy wasn’t one of them. ;)
Damn, I love it when our posts get this kind of commentary.
Ryan, Mike, Leslie, Jason — you all have good things to say.
Jason, you make a particularly good point about businesses (like ours) supporting the bad advertising with our economic vote. That’s a smart way to look at it. And, unfortunately, we’re guilty.
For the record, based on your comment, I checked with our IT guys to find out what it would take to move the site to another hosting company. Unfortunately, it’s not a 3-clicks-and-you’re-done kind of thing. Once it’s hosted on GoDaddy, it’s labor-intensive to change.
Given that, perhaps you could suggest other options so our readers can send their economic votes elsewhere?
(Note to GoDaddy: I would hate to think that the honest commentary on our site would result in a mysterious disappearance of this blog post. I’m not saying you’d do that. I’m just sayin’…)
I suppose I could recommend a few hosts, but it sounds like you were pretty happy with GoDaddy’s service. I’m all for companies providing good services (especially those run by American entrepreneurs), so perhaps the question should be…
- How do customers convince a growing (and successful) company that they’ve grown out of their old branding?
I may need to think about this…I’ll have a post up later this weekend. Feel free to drop by on Sunday using the link above and let me know what you think Jamie!
Hey, Jason. That sounds like a great post. I’ll check it out on Sunday (or Monday). It’s a big thought and I look forward to seeing your perspectives on it.
Best,
Jamie