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Hello, Go Daddy-o

Today, on that great American institution known as Superbowl Sunday, I posted a short comment on Go Daddy CEO Bob Parsons’s blog in response to his claim of how well Go Daddy’s ads have been working,

Commercials with bouncy-breasted babes may have drawn lots of new male customers and filled the company’s coffers, but they demonstrate to many other people that GoDaddy intends its image and business model to appeal to lowest-common-denominator prurient tastes. Sex may sell, but I’m not buying. GoDaddy lost my business, and I’ve suggested many others look elsewhere. Good luck as the apparent leading light of tech porn-vertising.

Maybe GoDaddy can merge with Hooters to be the one-stop shop for female exploitation.

Parsons’s reply was an unsurprising,

There’s no exploitation here of females or of anyone else for that matter.

Appreciate your post,

Bob

I will give Bob his due: at least he reads his criticisms, of which there are quite a few. On the topic of sex on TV, I consider myself to be pretty easy going by most standards. Among my favorite shows is Nip/Tuck, which manages to offend even the most jaded sensibilities. And I thought the hubbub caused by the arch-conservative Parents Television Council over the “Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction”– 2004’s halftime show which put the fear of God into CBS in the form of hefty FCC fines– was pure Puritan poppycock.

But advertising is another beastie: it’s not mere entertainment, but an attempt to sell something. And appeals to below-the-belt interests when pitching totally unrelated products are as common and clichéd as well, apple pie. And that’s what makes Go Daddy’s ads so cheesy: there is no actual differentiation or explanation of Go Daddy’s services; the “content” of the ads is just a pretext for jiggling breasts. Use of bouncy babes to sell friggin’ domain names? No, Bob, that’s not merely exploitive, that’s saying to your customers a whole lot ’bout your company. It may work for cheap beer– but amazing as it may be to believe, the Internet is a bit more than just alcoholic frat boys.

Wikipedia, of course, has an interesting, albeit poorly cited article on the subject: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godaddy#Marketing

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