A Little Super Bowl Sex Appeal Never Hurts

GoDaddy.com is arguably better known for its racy Super Bowl commercials than its core business—selling domain names. Now, for the second year in a row, it has a partner in the commercials.

And that startup partner is all about using the massive reach of the Super Bowl and the popularity of the GoDaddy commercials to extend its Internet reach. The company .CO Internet, which is competing to take a little bit of the market for Internet domain addresses from the more familiar .com, is splitting the more than $3 million production costs with GoDaddy for this year’s big game.

“It’s a big undertaking, I gotta tell you,” Juan Calle, the chief executive of .CO Internet, told Portfolio.com Friday. But he wants to reach the largest possible audience to build his business. And there’s no bigger audience than the one that will tune in Sunday to watch the New York Giants and New England Patriots battle it out for the Lombardi Trophy.

“Our logo is everywhere in this new ad,” Calle said. “One thing that I think is worth mentioning is the end goal—why are we doing this. We’d like to say we built a brand that is synonymous with opportunity and innovation. That is really the endgame in our company, and we’re working towards that.”

Launched in 2011 after years of wrangling to turn the nation of Colombia’s .co suffix into something more commercially usable, the company has landed some signature victories so far.

The Startup America Partnership is using it for its domain name and is offering free .co suffix addresses to companies that sign up with the partnership.

And, said Calle, the company has sold 1.2 million domain names and earned more than $22 million in revenue in its first year.

“That’s phenomenal for a startup,” he said.

The idea behind Calle’s company is to sell domain names for a little more than the familiar .com or .org names, discouraging squatters and making it easier for businesses and individuals to get the name they want without having to pay an outrageous price to a third party.

But making sure people know about the option takes a little doing, which is where the Super Bowl, and the sex appeal of the GoDaddy commercials, come into play.

“The biggest challenge that we have as a company is generating massive awareness,” Calle said. “Everything we know of the Internet is related to .com. In a market like the U.S., we figured where can we get the most eyeballs in one shot.”

So welcome back to the big-business game, .co.

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Kent Bernhard Jr. is News Editor of Portfolio.com