They were just 8 decades too early for Go Daddy notoriety
It’s trite, it’s predictable, and it’ll be indistinguishable from next year’s. Presenting our annual Super Bowl ad review.
Actually, this year’s review goes 3 sentences. It’s the epilogue that’s the money shot, as it were. 29% of the spots took place in office settings. White-collar workplaces are to modern commercials what the Old West was to 1950s TV series. And approximately 31% of the spots involved broken glass.
A special congratulations to the unflappable Bob Parsons, CEO/founder/head copywriter at Go Daddy and a man with a historic capacity for shamelessness. The original Bob Parsons, who punted for the Bears in the ’80s, really needs to insist that his namesake use an identifying middle initial.
It’s only with the greatest of reservations that one can criticize the Go Daddy Parsons, who grew up poor, joined the Marines at 18, was wounded and earned three combat medals in Vietnam, created multiple successful businesses, and in 2005 was one of the few people with a podium who had enough common sense to publicly dismiss the “torture” of terrorists at Guantanamo Bay for the harmless series of frat pranks it was.
This is not a criticism of Parsons’ seemingly unimpeachable character. But for the love of God, the man is the worst thing to happen to advertising since this slogan.
In 1997, Parsons had enough foresight to found a business in the one corner of the internet that would always remain bubbleproof – domain registration. In fact, the greater the bubble, the stronger Go Daddy seemed to get, as aspiring companies rushed to fill the void left by their overly ambitious predecessors.
Somewhere along the way, in his capacity as corporate advertising maven, Parsons evidently got wind of the axiom “sex sells”. Unfortunately, he never bothered to learn even a third word related to advertising. Five years into an experiment that shows no sign of abating, Go Daddy’s formula of buxom women and playground entendres can make even the most insatiably heterosexual of male viewers want to change the channel.
Parsons isn’t Go Daddy’s chief creative director merely by default. The company’s sole shareholder is also convinced that he’s the conceptual heir to David Ogilvy. Visit Parsons’ eponymous blog or even Go Daddy’s own site, and you’d think the company’s domain registration service is just an appendage to the primary business of creating landmark TV spots.
The frustrating thing is that Go Daddy actually managed to devise a clever online tagline once, only to inexplicably weaken it. Go Daddy augmented the pithy “Make a name for yourself” into the more blatant and less nuanced “Make a dot-com name for yourself”, as if the latter were a longstanding English idiom that could harbor a second meaning.
In its most recent manifestation, GoDaddy’s TV campaign featured a hackneyed business setting full of easily offended superannuated men, IndyCar pixie and perennial 8th-place finisher Danica Patrick, the visual foil of another shapely woman in progressing stages of undress, and perhaps some theme underlying the spot.
Notwithstanding Patrick’s giant leap forward for sexual equality, this spot actually represented a zenith of refinement and taste for Go Daddy. The company had reached its nadir in Super Bowl XLII, with another spot featuring Patrick executing her now-trademark move of the sultry unzip. In this spot a socialite emerges from the backseat of a limo, besieged by paparazzi. The camera travels up her legs to her lap, as she invites the audience to see her
The cardinal rule of working with words effectively is to write boldly. But the only way to complete that sentence with the requisite word “beaver” is to do so with a shake of the head and a squint. Yes, Parsons unloaded the same joke that an 8-year old boy would have used, putting an actual aquatic rodent in the spot. A year later, it’s painful to even find this clip on YouTube to confirm the details.
This complaint is not coming from prudishness. It’s coming from a disdain for all things juvenile. It would benefit the NFL’s image even more if Roger Goodell spent less time vacillating about running Pacman Jones and Michael Vick out of the league, and more on ensuring that Parsons and his annual $3 million checks never see another Super Bowl.
