Last week, Forbes’ announced its 2014 list of the 50 Most influential Chief Marketing Officers, and a domain industry CMO is included in this year’s list. Barb Rechterman is the Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at GoDaddy, and she was ranked by Forbes as the 18th most influential CMO for 2014.
The list includes Chief Marketing Officers from some of the largest and most well known companies in the world. Other CMOs you may recognize on this year’s list include Phil Schiller of Apple (#1), Kevin Krone of Southwest Airlines (#14), Anne Finucane of Bank of America (#20), Ariel Kelman of Amazon (#30), and Lorraine Twohill of Google (#36).
According to Rechterman’s LinkedIn profile, she has been GoDaddy CMO since 1997, the year the company was founded by Bob Parsons. Prior to working at GoDaddy, Rechterman was the Co-President of Parsons Technology, another company founded by Bob Parsons.
GoDaddy built its brand on the back of its (often controversial) marketing campaigns. Although the company has toned down its sexualized advertising in the past couple of years, the company continues to be one of the most prolific advertisers in the domain space. A handful of GoDaddy’s most well known recent marketing efforts include:
- NASCAR team featuring Danica Patrick
- Rugby League World Cup
- Super Bowl commercials
- GoDaddy Bowl (college football bowl game)
- World Series of Poker sponsorship
Forbes published an interview with Rechterman last year, and if you didn’t have a chance to read it when it was published, I recommend checking it out. Rechterman discusses GoDaddy’s advertising campaigns and how they made people aware of the company, building it into the largest domain name registrar in the world.
Rechterman has been in the executive suite at GoDaddy since the company’s founding, and I presume she deserves a great deal of credit. Being ranked in the Forbes to 50 Chief Marketing Officer list is quite an achievement, especially given the company’s shift in marketing strategy the past two years.
