GoDaddy, the online services company led by former Yahoo and Microsoft executive Blake Irving, relaunched its brand today with a makeover of its notoriously cluttered website and a new ad campaign that departs from its purposefully shockiing ads of the past.
It’s part of a broader effort by the domain registrar to expand its business into Internet services for small businesses. The campaign, starring Jean-Claude Van Damme, is scheduled to debut tonight during the NFL season opener on NBC. (See one of the ads below.)
Irving tells the New York Times that its advertising “doesn’t have to push customers away.” It is “still edgy, still fun, still entertaining, still irreverent” but “talking in a more grown-up way, doing things that are hilarious, memorable and don’t polarize.”
GoDaddy, based in Scottsdale Ariz., has opened an engineering center in Kirkland, Wash., and Irving hinted at this branding change in an interview with GeekWire last spring. The GoDaddy CEO is among the speakers at next week’s GeekWire Summit.
