Not really a domain name story, but I was sitting in a sports bar for lunch today and noticed something pretty dramatic on the live broadcast of the Gatorade Duel races in Daytona. I’m no race fan but just as I looked up the pack of cars was coming around a turn after a previous wreck. I looked up and paid attention because I noticed the hard-to-miss bright green Godaddy car driven by Danica Patrick near the back of the pack and remembered hearing something about this being one of her first races.
A few seconds later and suddenly Danica’s car goes screaming across the infield and slams the front passenger-side of her car in to an infield wall. It’s a pretty big smack, but she walks away . Too bad for Danica that the wreck puts her at the back of the pack but at least her sponsors are getting some more “screen time” and she’s still alive.
Please note that the following is a parody intended for April Fools day 2010.
After being blasted by the NewYork Post over issues with their domain back-order services, GoDaddy agreed today to completely overhaul the services. By having multiple customers pay $18.99 to back order the same domain, only to face each other in an online auction for the same domain, the company believes this is “not delivering value to our customers”.
Bob Parsons said in a statement “While I was bathing in the milk of 1000 coconuts last night, I got a call from Danica about this issue. At first I was like ‘Hey, sweetie, you stick to beating the boys in the cars and leave the serious business to us real men’, but then I started to see her point. To make up for it, we are going to let any affected members come to our office and participate in a first annual Dunk Danica event on April 1st between 3pm and 5pm.”
If you are a Godaddy member who has paid for a backorder only to have it end up in an auction, head on down to try your luck at dunking Danica in the Godaddy Dunk Tank.
Now that the Super Bowl game’s “Brand Bowl” is finished, the polls and opinions are popping up everywhere. This year there seems to be a lot more reactions and buzz bubbling on the internet, more so than in year’s past, thanks in part to social media sites.
Who had the cleverest ads? Who was the funniest? Facebook, Youtube and Twitter (and maybe even a few old-school water coolers) will be buzzing the rest of today with chatter about both an amazing game and some good and some not so good ads. Youtube’s voting is still going on and you can catch all the ads that you missed. There were some good ones that got a little chuckle from me, but generally speaking the creative wasn’t outstanding. The companies that advertised on the game and matter most in this little “domain world” were Google and Godaddy. . .
On Twitter a lot of people seemed to like the Google ad but like Jeff Jarvis in this article, I wasn’t really super impressed. It was a clever use of story to demonstrate the product and was classically simple, but really does something so simple as using Google need to be demonstrated? Jarvis makes a point about France and Football not being a great matchup. It could have been more audience targeted, but CEO Eric Schmidt admitted that the ad wasn’t created for specifically for the Big Game. Also, doesn’t Google already TOTALLY dominate search ? I get that it’s a great branding opportunity and the ad endeared many to the brand, but Google has a lot of other offerings to showoff to that the average guy on the couch may not have a clue about. Did they just release a phone or something ?
Overall, Google winning the love of most viewers is okay by me and it’s surreal to think that what some are calling the #1 advertisement is for a “new media” brand that has chipped away the base of “traditional media” revenues and completely changed the advertising landscape. To me, Google’s ad running on the Super Bowl gives the idea of Super Bowl advertising more legitimacy.
Most disappointing to me (and to several others) was the Godaddy commercials. Ok, we get it Godaddy. You like to have controversy and you like to have your ads pulled so you can get more PR before the game, but really come on. It’s done. It used to be impressive to me that a domain company had the money and guts to invest in expensive Super Bowl ads, but I’m over it. Godaddy released several ads this year. One ad got cut and two that didn’t get cut made it on air during the game (one posted below). Personally, I would have preferred the cut ad. It does a better job explaining the product and isn’t all about popping open shirts.
Back to the ads. The premise for these ads is basically pretend to show some boobies at the end and leave them hanging with ” See More at GoDaddy.com” . . .and I’m sure MANY went hoping to see more. Like one blogger points out “Not only do these cliffhanger endings generate buzz and capture the audience’s attention, it also gets people to actually visit GoDaddy.com to see what its all about.” Only problem is, like crying wolf, you can only pull this “trick” once. The viewer doesn’t get anything special when they go to the site.
You got the viewer to your site with the same “1 horse trick”. Now what? The viewer thinks “I went to the site and I didn’t get what I wanted”. They now remember you and your brand as being a company that teases them into thinking they were getting a “free porn show” . . . oh and maybe remembers you sell domain names. As Brian Clark from Copyblogger.com said, “Thanks GoDaddy, but your target audience already knows where the best porn on the web is“.
Fear not though, Godaddy is ready to give you the chance to show them how to do it better. In a similar fashion to other brands before them, Godaddy is holding a contest and awarding prizes for the best ads. Hopefully they have judges that aren’t the same 72% that voted in the previously mentioned poll.
If anyone has a camera, a ski boat and a pet shark, I’ve got a good idea for a commercial :)
A couple things in the news to report about GoDaddy.
First, GoDaddy released a preview of their upcoming Super Bowl ads. You can catch a preview of the commercials at here. Come on, I know you want to, they have hot women.
The second piece of news is the company’s departure of Adam Dicker, VP of Domain [...]