Bob Parsons Has a Blog
From BobParsons.com:

---

What happened to Go Daddy's second Super Bowl ad spot?

As you may have noticed our Super Bowl ad only appeared during the scheduled first quarter spot. It was scheduled to run also in the second ad position during the final two minute warning. Our ad never ran a second time. Instead, in its place, we saw an advertisement promoting "The Simpsons."

The NFL persuaded FOX to pull our ad.

We immediately contacted Fox to find out what happened. Here's what we were told: After our first ad was aired, the NFL became upset and they, together with Fox, decided to pull the ad from running a second time. Because we purchased two spots, we were also entitled to a "Brought to you by GoDaddy.com" 5 second marquis spot. They also chose to pull the marquis spot....

Stay tuned for more news as it develops.

I'm sure you'll be hearing more about this over the next few days. I believe that it's the first time ever a decision was made to pull an ad after it had already been run once during the same broadcast.

---

And there's a Brand Autopsy blog, which made the following comment on December 1, 2004:

---

The latest issue of Brandweek is reporting FOX Television has sold 75% of its advertising inventory for the 2005 Super Bowl. Of the 58 thirty-second commercials FOX has to sell, 42 spots are confirmed sold with an asking price of $2.4 million per spot.

The usual suspects (Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, and Visa) have committed to airing commercials. And some not so usual suspects (CareerBuilder.com and MBNA) are also participating.

And then there is GoDaddy.com.



This fledging domain name registrar has committed to airing one spot during the Super Bowl commercial mayhem in hopes of scoring “huge exposure” for the GoDaddy.com brand.

No GoDaddy no!

I beg you to please put the $2.4 million outlay into building a better product and not waste your entire marketing budget on a thirty-second Super Bowl commercial.

No GoDaddy no! Don’t do it!

You are being blinded by the marketing mirage of creating brand awareness that comes with the possibility of reaching 95 million viewers watching the Super Bowl … not to mention the publicity you hope to gain by being mentioned in the media as an advertiser.

But awareness doesn’t build preference.

Computer.com, OurBeginning.com, netpliance.com, and onmoney.com all tried to build awareness by advertising during the 2000 Super Bowl. Look where it got them – absolutely nowhere. You can learn a lot from their failures.

But since you obviously haven’t learned from the failures of past dot-com failures in advertising, maybe you’ll listen to a dot-com ‘advertising’ success story in Amazon.com.

Amazon has stopped doing broad-scale television advertising in favor of spending marketing dollars to make the customer experience better … like free shipping for orders over $25. (And sales are still going strong at Amazon).

I beg of you GoDaddy … don’t spend $2.4 million on one lousy thirty-second Super Bowl television commercial.

Instead, spend it on areas that will improve your product and improve your customer’s experience. Why? Because products worth talking about get talked about and that will help you go from creating awareness to building preference.

---

However, I guess that one could argue that you need to create awareness BEFORE you can build preference.