Yesterday, the New York Times published an article about GoDaddy’s branding and advertising shift, and the article was also syndicated on Boston.com today. The article noted that GoDaddy has changed its advertising agency of record to a company called Barton F. Graf 9000. GoDaddy had previously been working with Deutsch New York, the agency that began helping GoDaddy change its brand image.

Barton F. Graf 9000 is a New York based advertising agency. Some of the company’s other clients include Axe, Little Caesars, Ragu, Dish, and Kayak. Interestingly, the founder and CEO of the agency,  Gerry Graf, said that he has been a satisfied GoDaddy customer. Whois records confirm that the company’s domain name has been registered at GoDaddy since its creation.

Here are a few excerpts from the article that I found most interesting:

According to an article on Fortune that was published this afternoon, GoDaddy has reportedly filed its paperwork for an IPO. This is the second time the company filed to go public, although the company later opted against it.

I don’t have much to add about this at this point, but I think this is going to be a positive event for the domain space, as it will surely get people in the finance space more interested in learning about the domain name space. In my opinion, outside investment is one thing that has lacked in this business, and having more attention paid to domain names may prove to be a big positive for domain investors.

I look forward to reading articles about the IPO filing as well as subsequent reports about the company. Oftentimes, we learn quite a bit about a company’s business once it files for an IPO, and I assume we will learn much more about GoDaddy in the coming days. For example, recorded  $1.1 billion in revenue in 2013 and it has 12 million customers (according to Business Insider).

I am sure there will be much more news, analysis, and information coming out soon.  If you would like

GoDaddy is set to launch two new television commercials next week, and I think both are excellent. For your convenience, I embedded both of them below.

When a small business needs to have a website built, I would imagine most seek out a local web developer for their project. This is great for some businesses who are lucky enough to have competent web developers and designers that charge fair prices. For many people, finding someone local is difficult.

In my opinion, GoDaddy didn’t do such a great job of letting people know what the company does. With the change in marketing strategy, I think that has been changing, but I don’t think the Super Bowl and Jean Claude Van Damme commercials did enough to let people know exactly what GoDaddy does. With these two new television spots that are set to air on May 5th, I think GoDaddy is taking a step closer to doing that.

These new commercials, collectively called “Share Your Gift” are a part of the “It’s Go Time” campaign. These commercials were created by a company called The Red Brick Road.

Have a look at the two commercials and let me know what you think of them.