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Bob Parsons

People you should know in golf: Bob Parsons – Part 3

Find out how a wardrobe malfunction and banned TV advert gave Bob Parsons the break he needed...
 

Why was the dotcom bust such a good thing for GoDaddy.com?

Everybody we were competing with for advertising all went away. Dotcom company after dotcom company folded. We were doing business with some and we’d go to pay them but they weren’t there any more. There’s worse problems to have.

I had people standing in line ready to sell me advertising. I had more friends than I thought I had because I was one of the guys who actually paid his bills. I still had $6m.

How did you get to the next level?

Bob Parsons

Our programs work, our software was good our domain name programs worked great. We got up to about a 16 percent worldwide market share. And I couldn’t figure out that when our software was the best, our prices were the cheapest, the service was the best why companies that were far worse than us were still doing a significant amount of business.

I hired a market research firm in 2004 to find out about the people we weren’t doing business with and they told us our advertising wasn’t reaching them.

We had a $10m war chest, we were a very viable company so I thought ‘let’s debut on the Superbowl’. And in 2005, that’s what we did.

What was the thinking behind advertising during the Superbowl?

In the United States when you watch the Superbowl there’s a lot of cocktails, a lot of beer, people are walking around and watching it.

Bob Parsons

So if you run an advert and it gets their attention, you have done your job.

So how in the world am I going to get their attention when they are involved in conversations, drinking, this that and the other?

I didn’t understand how we were going to do it until I saw this advert:

[skylab_video id=”121575″]Go Daddy advert 1[/skylab_video]

 

This is the inspiration behind everything I have ever done in advertising. After I saw it, I wanted to talk about it the next day.

I reached out and found the company who did it – The Ad Store – and I had them make an advert for us that would be a little in your face.

This was in 2005, the year after Janet Jackson had her wardrobe malfunction and exposed ‘righty’ to millions of people.

This advert took me forever to get it approved. It got approved the week before the Superbowl. Right after they approve it the guy from Fox asks me if I want to buy another advert. I didn’t have time to make another advert so they said to run the same ad twice. It got approved twice.

[skylab_video id=”121576″]Go Daddy advert 2[/skylab_video]

 

Ain’t that a thing of beauty? When it ran our servers start shaking.

We’re waiting for the second advert but instead a Fox advert comes on for the Simpsons and it’s Homer stabbing a baby. You couldn’t make this shit up.

So our ad never runs. I get hold of the president of Fox Sports after the game and he says they copped so much heat for it that they had to pull it. He said to call him the following morning to let him know what I wanted.

I’m guessing you made the situation work to your advantage?

I turned to my chief operating officer and I said to him ‘can we be this lucky to have this happen?’ It has never happened before.

So I wrote a blog article that night which got picked up all over the world and all TV stations covered the ad that got censored. Every radio and TV station played it, it was in the newspapers and everybody told the readers what GoDaddy did.

I did interviews from dawn till dusk. The GoDaddy girl as she became known was on the today show, the tonight show, the tomorrow show. She was on the Howard Stern show.

Bob Parsons

Our market share went from 16 percent to 25 percent, the next year it went to 34 then to 40. Right now GoDaddy’s market share is over 70 percent worldwide.

In 2011 I did a deal with GoDaddy which valued the company at $2.25bn. I had no debt. I had about 30 employees who had been with me from the get-go they each got over $1m, one of the girls who helped me come up with the name GoDaddy got over $200m. It’s kind of a happy story.

So a lot of people have asked me where I learned to program a computer. Stanford. I won’t be on the alumni list, but that’s where I learned.

What did you do next?

I’m still involved with GoDaddy, I’m the largest single shareholder. I quit being the CEO in 2011. I became chairman but quit when it became public, I don’t want to be the chairman of a public company as that’s like actual work.

I became a board member which is what I am to this day and I started investing in other things. We own shopping malls, we do business loans, we have a big advertising agency, we do movie production and sound recording.

We own the largest Harley Davidson dealership in the world – 150,000 sq ft. We have a wedding chapel in there, I married the first couple. I got ordained as a minister online, it cost me $5.

Bob Parsons

We own one of the best golf properties in the country – Scottsdale National.

We also have The Bob and Renee Parsons Foundation and over the past five years we’ve given $127m to charity.

We help the marine corps who I owe every thing to. As long as I have a dime they’ll have a nickel. We’ve given them $10m a year for the past several years.

Perhaps our fastest-growing business is PXG – Parsons Xtreme Golf

Part 4: Why and how did Bob start a golf equipment company? – CLICK HERE

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