GoDaddy's 2013 Super Bowl Commercial Is Super Cringe, But Did Its Job

Forget football; plenty of viewers tune into the Super Bowl every year on the strength of the commercials alone. For Super Bowl LVII in 2023, a 30-second spot cost $7 million. That leaves advertisers to truly consider how they proceed artistically. Some ads are downright cinematic, with companies enlisting the likes of David Fincher and the Coen brothers to direct. Others are tear-jerking affairs. The Super Bowl also has a knack for producing the raunchiest commercials of the year.

The website registrar GoDaddy has emphatically leaned into raunchy ads over the years, with the National Review comparing its commercials to "Girls-Gone-Wild." GoDaddy's 2013 Super Bowl commercial was the company's cringiest effort yet. It begins with race car driver Danica Patrick breaking down the company into two disparate but equally important sides, sexy and intelligent, as personified by Bar Refaeli and Jesse Heiman. Then, the two proceed to make out for about 15 seconds.

The ad wasn't a fan favorite. It scored last in USA Today's Ad Meter and spurred 290,000 responses on Twitter, most of them deriding the ad as sexist, offensive, and uncomfortable. Even former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele tweeted, "That #godaddy commercial was VERY DISTURBING."

Nevertheless, the commercial was a clear success. The day after the game, GoDaddy posted its biggest sales day in company history, with an addition of 10,000 new customers and a hosting sales jump of 45% compared to 2012.

For GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving, the commercial's immense success came as no surprise. "Attracting new customers is what advertising is all about," he said in a statement (via VentureBeat). "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."

The irreverence was key to the jump in sales, Irving continued. "Inappropriate? Hearing that word, I absolutely knew we were in for a record Super Bowl ad campaign. And by the way, I think both of our ads were the funniest in the game, by far." The ad was almost even more inappropriate; according to Irving, CBS had rejected two earlier versions of the commercial.

If you can believe it, the kiss-heavy commercial was actually part of an effort to make GoDaddy's ads more mature and broad-reaching. In 2012, the company began working with marketing agency Deutch New York to distance itself from previous ads that relied on sexual innuendo and women known as GoDaddy Girls. In addition to the kissing commercial, Deutch New York was responsible for a series of ads starring Jean-Claude Van Damme. The company switched creative agencies in 2014, inking a deal with Barton F. Graf 9000. "We are for the entrepreneur, we are for women, we are for women entrepreneurs," GoDaddy's chief marketing officer, Barb Rechterman, told the New York Times. "We don't need to be risqué to do this."