Upsetting millions of potential
customers at one time is not a good marketing plan, yet that is exactly what
GoDaddy.com did in what Boycott Watch can only call the most stupid and
disgusting television ad of all time. We are not going to link to the ad in the
interests of good taste, but our review of the Tweets indicates unanimous
disdain for the ad. Suffice it to say that slobbering kissing scenes with geeks
are not what most people want their small kids to see on television. That's not
the full story though.
Advertisers will tell you
what they want is to be remembered, even if the ad is stupid, and sometimes
they aim for stupid just so the company name is remembered. Here, having stupid
content was the smallest problem with the GoDaddy ad. The ad is not memorable
for being funny or weird, but because it made people want to vomit. Here is a
sample of the Tweets about the ad during the game:
Image 1: consumer disgust with the GoDaddy ad.
GoDaddy.com spent $6 Million to air the ad, and probably
another million to make it. When a business spends that much money to be
remembered for their ad, they don't want the kind of negative response we see
on Twitter. Despite that, GoDaddy.com posted a press release the next morning
starting with:
SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. (Feb. 4, 2013) - This
year's Super Bowl commercials are an unprecedented business success for the
world's largest Web host and domain name provider Go Daddy.com . Its two
30-second ads drove tremendous buzz and business, giving Go Daddy its most
successful Super Bowl Sunday ever. Last night's ads delivered more new
customers and more overall sales, as compared to any other Super Bowl campaign
in the company's history. "
Attracting new customers is what
advertising is all about," said Go Daddy CEO Blake Irving. "We wanted our Super
Bowl commercials to generate new customers and overall sales, and that's
precisely what happened. We set all-time Super Bowl Sunday records for mobile
sales, Website Builders, website hosting and new customers. This is a big win
for all our teams who worked so hard to deliver on game day and also for all
our new customers looking to grow their small businesses."
There is a problem here - GoDaddy.com lied, and they
lied big.
One look at the Internet traffic pattern
from Alexa shows a traffic increase in the days leading up to the game and flat
traffic the day of the game. After airing the ad, the next day traffic was
considerably down despite the claims by GoDaddy.com that the ad generated
"unprecedented business success." Additionally, the fact that the GoDaddy.com
press release was posted the day after the game indicates GoDaddy.com wanted to
portray success even before the business day in which they claimed record
success for was actually over. Essentially, GoDaddy planned to promote success
from the ad before having concrete numbers to crunch, and the evidence speaks
the opposite of what GoDaddy claimed. The following web traffic images show
GoDaddy, which is an online company, had a drop in web traffic, not the boost
the company claimed in their press release. In fact, since we can expect some
people went to their website to see the ad because of the buzz, we can
therefore extrapolate a drop in sales based on the drop in traffic.
Image 2: Feb 3, flat traffic on Super Bowl Sunday. Feb 4,
major traffic drop-off
Image 3: Percentage of the total
daily Internet traffic down for GoDaddy
Image 4:
Sharp drop off in GoDaddy page views means people were not buying their
products as GoDaddy claimed
Boycott Watch sees
GoDaddy loosing somewhere between $6.5-7 Million on the world's worst ad, and
far more in the future from consumers who will shy away from GoDaddy for years
to come.
"Shock ads do not necessarily work" said
Fred Taub, President of Boycott Watch. "In this case GoDaddy made their
audience sick, and that is what people will remember along with the fact that
parents were watching the football game with their kids in what they expected
to be family-oriented sports entertainment, but that's not what they got. This
ad will go down in history as one of the biggest mistakes in television history
and studied in marketing classes for generations."
Fred Taub also pointed continued sexualization of the game may cause parents to
not want to allow their children to watch the game in the future. While the NFL
did apologize after the Janet Jackson incident, they certainly continue to
facilitate unnecessary extreme sexuality in their overall product, and that may
result in lower profits to the NFL in the long run. |
| |
|
|
| Advertisement: |
 |
|
|
| |
|
|
