GoDaddy's Super Bowl puppy ad ended with the puppy sold online — pulled in a day

For Super Bowl XLIX, GoDaddy prepared 'Journey Home': a puppy named Buddy falls off the back of a truck, survives the elements and treks home, only to be greeted with heartbreaking news — the family, assuming Buddy was gone, had sold his litter online through a website built with GoDaddy. The joke was meant to show that anyone can sell anything with a GoDaddy site. The teaser was released online on 27 January 2015, ahead of the 1 February game.

Animal-welfare groups and viewers read the punchline another way: the story made selling a pet the happy ending, which sounded like an endorsement of puppy mills and the online sale of animals. PETA's senior director Colleen O'Brien said buying dogs from breeders and pet stores means shelter dogs die. The outcry built through the day, and GoDaddy pulled the ad the same day it was released, apologising and swapping its Super Bowl slot to a different commercial.

PETA publicly praised the withdrawal as the right decision. For GoDaddy the episode undid the point of the exercise: the company was mid-makeover from stunt-driven Super Bowl fame toward a warmer, small-business brand, and the launch of that rebrand became a story about an ad that had to be pulled before the game even started.