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TRANSCRIPT:
DOUG: Greg, let’s start with brand transformation. And that’s been something that’s been important to GoDaddy. What’s your top takeaway when planning for a brand transformation or pivot, and how you perceived in the public eye?
GREG: Well, Doug, I think the first thing that people need to remember is that your brand transformation has to be rooted in the value you deliver to your stakeholders. It can’t be words on paper. It can’t be an ad campaign. It has to be rooted in what you’re giving them that helps them get through life easier, accomplish tasks more efficiently or effectively, or introduces new capabilities they didn’t have before.
DOUG: Yeah, and changing perception can be important as well.
GREG: I think all that proceeds from delivering value to your stakeholders. GoDaddy has been around for nearly 30 years, and we got famous by letting people get their own slice of the internet. Go out and get a domain with the name of your choosing, and then you could set up shop on the internet and let people know what you have to sell, or what you’re about, or a message you want to convey. And GoDaddy went through a very intentional brand transformation within the last ten years, really, to focus on small business owners, helping the smallest of the smallest small businesses really figure out how to get their presence online and how to sell online as well. And so, with that laser focus, everything else proceeds as the company has evolved into something very different than where it started.
DOUG: Yeah. And you were one of the people early in the space to really take a look at experimentation, applying it to the communications and marketing functions, to decision making. Of course.
GREG: Yeah, precisely. I think there’s a lot of experimentation in tech by nature, but with our leadership at GoDaddy, led by our CEO Aman Bhutani, we have experimentation baked into everything we do every day. And those aren’t just words. We actually executed 2000 structured experiments in 2024. And every department, every team has experiments where you have. It’s the old scientific method you learned about in middle school, where you have your hypothesis and you’ve got your objectives, and you’ve got controls and variables. And really, at the end of the day, it’s all about drilling down to the level of, did we have a successful experiment in terms of was it a win, was it a loss, or was it inconclusive? And I can tell you in our culture, we’d much rather have a win or a loss. Those are about on equal footing. It’s the ones where we don’t have a great conclusion to draw from the experiment, that we scratch our heads and say, that didn’t feel great. So, we really are looking forward to every time coming up with an experiment where we can learn something and evolve, and get better for the next time.
DOUG: Yeah, I was going to ask about that inconclusive portion because it’s rare. As good a job as you do with the prep and test setup, it’s rare that it’s zero to 100 on that. Sometimes, adjustment obviously, maybe 90/10 is good enough to go with, but sort of the great clump in the middle. Are there any strategies you take to try and reduce the number of these experiments that are inconclusive?
GREG: Fortunately, there aren’t too many of them, and we actually run an experimentation showcase every month where anyone in the company can submit an experiment that they conducted for review, criticism, and critique and praise from everyone in the company. And I can tell you, nearly the entire leadership attends every one of these meetings, and it’s very democratic. We have employees voting on every experiment as well. So, a lot of them get a gold star, as you would at your elementary school science fair. And the ones with the most amount of stars get brought up for discussion. And people can learn from this. So, even if I’m in a completely different function, in a different department, I can learn from what somebody else did and apply that to my work. When it comes to inconclusive experiments, usually what we do is we can look at things like whether the data set is statistically significant, but we can also look at what were the variables that were used. And maybe we needed a different control or different variables to be able to get to a conclusive resolution to that experiment. So, oftentimes, we have so many people who are invested in this process that somebody will grab you by the arm and say, hey, I’ve got an idea for you, and they’ll help hone that. So, the next experiment gives you a win or a loss.
DOUG: Before we get to some specific experimentation examples and have it paid off for you. Congratulations on the tremendous recognition you received at Cannes. Can you talk a bit about that?
GREG: Thank you very much. On behalf of all of the people who had their hands on this. It was a Cannes Lions B2B Grand Prix award that was bestowed upon us for our work with our Super Bowl campaign, which launched into a year long integrated marketing campaign featuring actor Walton Goggins. And so, our work was recognized with the Grand Prix because it integrated a lot of the functions that come together in the marketing communications space, and it really was a team effort led by an amazing, creative, fantastic, very willing, and collaborative celebrity partner for us who is actually a small business owner. Just like we try to speak to every day through our messaging. And so many different people touched this from a public relations and communication standpoint. It was a fascinating campaign to work on, where we announced in November 2024 that we were going back to the Super Bowl as a company for the first time in eight years, after getting famous for being a Super Bowl advertiser for all those years. And then we also had Walton Goggins announcing that he had launched a small business called Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses, which got a ton of awareness and publicity. And we announced in January that those two things were one and the same, and that that very real business that he started was created using GoDaddy Airo, our AI experience, which ties all the prevailing AI platforms through our products. To help you as a small business owner, launch, start selling, market your business, everything you could possibly need, and you can do that now in a matter of minutes, as opposed to it used to take weeks or months.
DOUG: One of the things obviously you had that in mind, and we’re developing the campaign before he became the breakout star. I mean, The White Lotus is a franchise that was extremely well-known. But, you know, going into this season, you might not have known Walton Goggins if you were out there. How did you end up selecting him? And then obviously, there was some good fortune that he became such a crucial character in the show.
GREG: Without question, I think the most important thing for us was that we looked at celebrities to really embody the GoDaddy era was that we needed somebody who had small business interests and a kind of an entrepreneur at heart mindset. And Walton certainly has that. He’s had other businesses before. And when we sat down to talk to celebrity candidates, we wanted to know what were their what were their pet projects. they had maybe never launched before, or what were areas of business that they’d be interested in getting into. And that’s when this very quickly named business Walton Goggins goggle glasses took shape, and he leaned in in a tremendous way in interviews and on social media. You know, he did so much for small business owners and hopefuls out there to see how easy it is to start in this day and age, out with an internet presence. I mean, 20 years ago, 30 years ago, if you wanted a small business, you had to find a brick-and-mortar location, hire staff, get utilities, get insurance, and stop to inventory. Now, if you have a business idea, you can really launch that in a matter of minutes, especially using some of these AI powered tools. And if it works great, you’re off to the races. And if it doesn’t, you can sunset it and try five more by the end of the month. And that’s the beauty of this. I come from a long line of small business owners, and I think the stakes are actually very low now in terms of getting started, where the potential can be really high, and you can do a lot of experimentation on your own as a small business owner using these tools that are available to you.
DOUG: I don’t even know if it was called bootstrapping then, but I end up bootstrapping it from a fourth floor walkup apartment in New York City that I shared with a roommate with my six foot by 12 foot bedroom in there. Pretty crazy, but we were talking experimentation. Any recent examples that have paid off? Obviously, the Super Bowl. Did you do some experimenting with that? Or if there are other examples you want to share?
GREG: Certainly, with a project as expansive and all-consuming as launching a Super Bowl ad, especially one that kicks off a year-long integrated marketing communications campaign, it was important for us to have experimentation baked into all the different tentacles of this octopus, and so we saw a lot of different experiments baked in for us. On the communication side, it was really important to figure out how we might be able to stand out from the crowd, because any Super Bowl ad is a sizable investment for any organization, and you want to make sure that your creative has an opportunity to get noticed. And so, for us, it was not just the revelation that GoDaddy was coming back after an eight-year hiatus. It was that we had a very unique campaign to launch. And so once we revealed in January of 2025 that GoDaddy Super Bowl ad was tied to this brand new business launched by Walton Goggins, whose star was most certainly on the rise, we really wanted to bake that into the types of media outlets that we approached, the kind of storytelling we could do on our own through own channels and sponsored channels, and then through social media as well. And so, we had a lot of that baked in. It even went so far as to how we engaged our own employees. And so, with a little bit of experimentation, we had a video series that culminated in the reveal that two of our employees at each interval would get Super Bowl tickets, and we didn’t send any executives to the game. We actually let our employees go and enjoy being at the Super Bowl as part of this campaign, because it was a way to drum up interest internally and support and encouragement for employees to develop a lot of pride around GoDaddy being back in the Super Bowl again.
DOUG: Is there anything personal that you want to share that people might not know about you?
GREG: I have a lot of hobbies. I play a lot of sports. Some of them well, some of them not so well. But one thing that I’ve enjoyed over the last ten years is endurance hiking. And so, I recently completed a hike for Make-A-Wish Foundation two years ago, where I hiked 28 miles in one day to raise money for the wish kids that Make-A-Wish Foundation, an amazing organization, supports. This year, I decided to push that boundary a little bit further. So, with some friends, I made it 30 miles in one day. And so, it reminds me of the work that we do every day in communications, which is it’s rarely a sprint, it’s usually a marathon. And while I’m not a runner, you’re always going uphill in communications and bringing people along with you and encouraging each other. So, if there’s a metaphor in there somewhere that’s a value to somebody, that would be fantastic. But for me, it’s a great way to think about life and a great way to think about challenges ahead of you.
DOUG: That’s really awesome. Thanks so much for being with us.
GREG: Thank you, Doug, for the opportunity to chat with you.
