Go Daddy Hopes Super Bowl Ads Are Risque Again

Feb. 4, 2011 — -- While more than 100 million people are expected to watch Super Bowl XLV this Sunday evening in homes and bars across the country, employees of the domain name company Go Daddy will be working diligently at their headquarters in Scottsdale, Ariz.

"Are you kidding me? It's a work day," said the company's founder and CEO, Bob Parsons.

As Go Daddy's seventh Super Bowl advertising campaign goes live, a large number of the company's 2,950 employees will be glued to computer monitors tracking visits to its website.

It is hard to imagine anyone arguing with Parsons about the importance of its racy Super Bowl campaigns to the company's bottom line. Its advertising strategy, which has included ads with IndyCar driver Danica Patrick and fitness coach Jillian Michaels, has put the brand squarely in the Super Bowl milieu.

This year, the company is continuing its strategy of airing previews of risque commercials to pique the interest of Super Bowl viewers enough that they continue watching them on the Go Daddy website.

"We start with an edgy TV ad and have a much edgier Internet-only version," said Parsons. "The formula works for us. It gets people to our website."

This Sunday, one commercial will feature Patrick and Michaels and another will be a new "Go Daddy Girl" spot.

"She's a Hollywood icon, so you will recognize her immediately," said Parsons, without revealing the identity of the celebrity. "When the idea came up, we knew it was a good idea, and I believe she agreed pretty quickly."

The new spokeswoman will promote the Web domain extension .co, which is an abbreviation of .com and the code assigned to the country of Colombia.

"It's an abbreviated dotcom and it's going to be defined as a better dotcom," said Parsons. "We've got the people behind it and promoting it."

Before the company began airing Super Bowl commercials, it had 16 percent market share of new domain registrations.

After the first Super Bowl commercial in 2005, which was a spoof of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction from the previous year, the company's market share increased to 25 percent.

Now, the company manages half the websites in the country.