案例库 · 广告与公关 · 市场决策 · 2015
这条还没译成中文，下面是英文原文。
GoDaddy's Super Bowl puppy ad ended with the puppy sold online — pulled in a day
January 27, 2015: GoDaddy's Super Bowl teaser ended with a lost puppy sold online via a GoDaddy site. Outrage over puppy mills pulled it the same day.
GoDaddy · 2015-01
怎么回事
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.
为什么会这样
- The joke's structure required the puppy sale to be the happy ending; a plot whose punchline is replacing a lost pet reads as endorsing the trade, whatever the intent.
- Releasing the teaser online days before the game gave the outrage a full news cycle to build while the broadcast slot was still locked in.
- The brand was mid-rebrand toward warmth and had no goodwill banked yet, so the harshest reading of the ad won.
教训
When an animal is the hero, its fate is the message. The plot's moral, not the intent, is what the audience defends — test it before the teaser ships.
后来呢
GoDaddy ran a different commercial in the slot and kept its softer creative direction in the following years. The pull remains a standard example of teaser timing: the ad was never broadcast, yet the story cost more than the slot.
资料来源
- CBS News Sacramento — GoDaddy pulls controversial 'Journey Home' puppy mill ad
- USA Today For The Win — GoDaddy pulls controversial Super Bowl ad after viewers protest
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