Open We Stand

ROLES: CREATIVE LEADERSHIP, CREATIVE VISION & STRATEGY, CREATIVE DIRECTION, CASTING DIRECTION, CAMPAIGN OVERSIGHT, MULTI-CHANNEL ALIGNMENT.

CHANNELS: TV, SOCIAL, OUTDOOR, WEBSITES, PHOTOGRAPHY, DISPLAY, RADIO, PR, EMAIL, BLOG, INTERNAL COMMS.

It’s mid-March 2020, COVID was something the world had never seen before, and the main tool we had at our disposal was to stay at home. What did that mean for GoDaddy’s base of everyday entrepreneurs? These little guys didn’t have stockpiles of cash or alternate revenue streams, and we knew they would be hit very hard.

We knew, if we were to call ourselves their champion, we had to show up.

The Solution: We launched a movement of anything and everything we could to help. Within 10 days, we launched films (including global adaptations) honoring their incredible resilience and saying we would stand by them with free products, tools, and resources. This drove to a landing page that was bigger than our company. It was resources, community, advice, forums, offers, partnerships, and more.

Results:

This was a pivotal moment of solidifying GoDaddy’s new, evolved brand to the world, not just the US. The hero Open We Stand film was the most performant ad since the rebrand, proving that consumers want brands to stand by their values.

  • Brand Search Query Volume up by 12%, crushing our goal of +3%

  • 4.5 billion impressions! Over half of those impressions are from paid advertising (with an average CPM of nearly half our target), 24% are from brand social and 17% are from PR.

  • 59M YouTube views on our 60s spot.

  • We had our strongest Q2 ever.

  • With this campaign, the US exceeded ‘For People Like Me’ scores in 2020 with Q4 setting a record high of 32.7%

  • Hitting a 12 month high in brand awareness.

  • The campaign drove our YouTube subscribers over 117K

  • And our Instagram followers over 61K.

  • 601 LinkedIn Community members.

The openwestand.org site featured:

– Articles, resources, guidance – in real-time we were gathering anything that could help our customers remain open.

– A community section so everyday entrepreneurs could chat and figure out how others were finding ways to remain open.

– 120+ offers from ourselves and partners – we knew this was bigger than us so we joined together with 70+ other companies.

Actions speak louder than words - The Pledge:

We publicly declared that every time we opened our wallets we would consider if we could be shopping at an independent versus a big guy. We published our pledge in Inc Magazine – the Founders Saving Main St issue, on our social channels and on openwestand.org and godaddy.com

Shoppable ads

Using our media dollars to literally provide clicks to our customers’ websites also increased our brand love.

We got a 3.8% increase in ad recall and a (reliable) 99% chance they contributed to brand lift at a cost per brand lift of only $0.11.

We partnered with SuperFly to host SmallBizLive.

A 6-hour event that was seen by over 10M users and raised $1M.

Results:

  • Overall 80M impressions for the SmallBizLive program + 11M additional impressions from the Bustle Digital Group.

  • 102 $5000 grants were distributed to entrepreneurs of color and women with the remaining funds going toward long-term small business support programs.

  • According to a Neilson study, we had a 22.4% lift to our brand.

Always On Content Updates

We stayed on top of updates – The Cares Act, Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), applying for funding and grants… as we heard updates, we let people know with 62 videos and counting.

GoFundMe Small Business
Relief Fund

GoDaddy contributed $500k to the GoFundMe Small Business Relief Fund.

We were in The New York Times

More press