Super Bowl provocateur GoDaddy grows up, gets personalized

Ah, the Super Bowl is upon us. It’s the time of year when marketers lurk in hallways, wait for sports fans to get up and grab snacks, and then swoop down onto the good couch with their second-screen devices to watch the competition… of ads.

And while there are a few new advertisers for Super Bowl 50, like Pokemon and Amazon, at least one mainstay is sitting this one out, and that’s GoDaddy.

GoDaddy, the creator of infamous Super Bowl ads since 2005, has shifted strategy away from big brand awareness towards personalized, data-driven marketing. As part of this change in direction, GoDaddy hired TBWA\Chiat\Day New York as its first agency of record. The Omnicom agency also has the digital understanding of GoDaddy’s small business platform and its power to personalize meaningful, data-driven messages, said GoDaddy CMO Phil Bienert, who led the agency review process.

You can hear Bienert speak about the evolution of GoDaddy’s marketing strategy at his session “Brave New World — How Personalization Can Drive Customer Affinity and Strengthen Brands” on February 22 at VentureBeat’s Marketing.FWD Summit.

GoDaddy’s roots are in domain registration, and it is still the world’s largest domain registrar. But since the company started calling itself GoDaddy in 1999, it has gained more than 13 million customers.

Many of these customers are very small businesses, often with five or fewer employees, in industries ranging from technology to craft beer to beaded jewelry. To help these businesses grow, GoDaddy offers email marketing, SEO, and other marketing tools. The company has a partnership with Microsoft Office for small-business productivity software, and it offers products in 37 countries and 17 languages.

So it’s not a stretch to deduce that the high-CPM, high-reach, highly male-dominated content of U.S. Super Bowl advertising might not be the best use of GoDaddy’s marketing dollars today, despite all the buzz and glory surrounding game day.

In addition to getting more personalized, it looks like GoDaddy is also growing up. Hear more at Marketing.FWD Summit on February 22 in New York City. Register now!