GoDaddy.com ads have always had a particular “what the hell?” effect for me whenever I’ve seen them. GoDaddy.com is in fact a large, well known internet website hosting service. I have seen their service in use, and being a web design major, all I can really say about the speed and quality of their service is, well, I’m not impressed. But despite what I consider to be a number of shortcomings to their service, speed being the first, ease of use and simplicity of design being two other equally important problems the website provider suffers from, they have managed to overcome this with a very specific advertising campaign.
This campaign, as you may well know, centers around sexually racy depictions of women. That’s it. Upon seeing the commercials you are not endowed with a supreme understanding and appreciation of what the service is, or what you can do there, nor are you any more intelligent or complete as a human being (as I believe should be required by modern day commercials). In fact all you see is the logo of the company displayed in various ways on scantily clad, unrealistically endowed women with a promise to “see what happens next” at godaddy.com. I already knew that sex sells, but I didn’t know that that’s all you need to sell anything at all.
The question of course is not whether these ads are effective (as they obviously are), but whether they are ethically questionable. And I say yes. Of course it is every woman’s right to project her own image however she sees fit within the parameters of what the law allows. What is ethically questionable in my opinion is the portrayal of women as mere objects of physical perfection to be objectified in a society (the USA) that already places far too much importance on physical appearance as a means of social placement. I seriously doubt that young girls growing up want or need the added pressure of growing up with negative self images, but further objectifying these girls once they get there surely isn’t helping. As nice as some of these girls are to look at given the situation, I think we can do without the GoDaddy.com ads, but that’s just me.
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