GoDaddy Will Sit Out Super Bowl 50

After 10 years of airing some of the raciest commercials in the history of the Super Bowl, GoDaddy has decided to pass on the opportunity to appear in February’s broadcast.

The call to exit advertising’s biggest event comes a day after GoDaddy named WPP’s MEC its first-ever global media planning and buying agency of record, and a month after the web domain registrar tapped Omnicom’s TBWA to spearhead its worldwide marketing strategy.

While its past Super Bowl efforts have raised the brand’s profile considerably, the time has come to “move beyond the generic megaphone of a SB campaign to a more targeted brand of marketing. We can ‘talk’ to the segment of the SB audience we want (very small business owners) and do it in a more personal and timely way.”

Sidelining itself will save GoDaddy anywhere from $4.7 million to $5 million in airtime, plus the millions of dollars it costs to produce a Super Bowl-quality spot.

GoDaddy began buying time in the Super Bowl back in 2005, when it aired a spoof of the Janet Jackson “wardrobe malfunction” mishegas that rocked the previous year’s halftime show. While the racy spot was scheduled to air twice during Fox’s coverage of Super Bowl XXXIX, the network pre-empted the second run with an in-house promo for “The Simpsons.”