The War of the Girls - Victoria's Secret and GoDaddy Trade Barbs

Could this be the beginning of the first Super Bowl ad-related controversy this year?  In an interview with USA Today last week, Victoria’s Secret chief creative officer Ed Razek described the theme of his upcoming Super Bowl ad and defended the use of sexuality to sell his product.

"Somebody will make noise about it just as they do another dozen commercials," says Ed Razek, chief creative officer for Victoria's Secret. "If you are in the business of lingerie and supermodels, you do an ad about lingerie and supermodels."

And then he added…

"This ad is classy. This isn't GoDaddy.com."

Well, GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons refused to let this slide. When asked about it by Paul McNamara in his Network World blog,  Bob fired back…

"How are they any different than us?"  "All of sudden they're classy (and we're not). I don't think so."

“The implied message here (from Victoria's Secret) is that suspiciously thin-looking women are classy. … I think they would be classier if their commercial instead implied that it's quite normal to occasionally have something to eat."

We'll be watching to see if this war of the girls escalates between these two savvy marketers.

One thing we saw last year is that a little controversy isn't a bad thing. We dove deep into the controversies surrounding the GM, Nationwide and Snickers ads last year in this study for the WOMMA (Word of Mouth Marketing Association) Measuring Word of Mouth Vol. 3.  All three advertisers were among the most talked about brands in the game last year, but Nationwide stood apart from the others.  This article shows how they did it. We've also got a free abstract of this here on our site.

Comments

[Jim Bob]

Hello Bob Parsons! Its clear there is a difference between GoDaddy and Victorias Secret. In fact there is a difference between Bikini Joes and GoDaddys girls as seen in the Miami TV ad for GoDaddy from Bikini Joe and his Models in South Beach http://BikiniJoe.com

Now you can just guess what http://JoeAmerica.org had to do to get some of the stuff they spoofed on the GoDaddy Standoff!

[Yoe]

Now you can see the best http://GoDaddySuperbowlAds.moonfruit.com these ads are the best of what GoDaddy has come up with so far, simple and to the point...SEX!