Web hosting brand GoDaddy is trying a functional, no-nonsense approach to reaching Canadians with an entrepreneurial streak.

The new, simple spots embrace the “can do attitude” of Canadian small business owners, will websites appearing in moments for any range of passion, side hustle or dream business, from landscaping to dog grooming.

Juniper Park\TBWA once again led creative for the brand.

There are seven different new videos in the campaign, which is an attempt to articulate how GoDaddy’s products can help a variety of different business, says Anne De Aragon, GoDaddy Canada’s VP and country manager. It’s got a website builder and templates, social media tools like marketing, email, design suites, e-commerce solutions, and other services beyond just the domain registration service it is perhaps best known for, she says.

While the target is still Canadian small business operators, it is different from its previous Andre De Grasse-led platform that put the focus on the entrepreneurs themselves to instead show all the different things GoDaddy can offer them.

“We’re showing different snippets of what you can do with GoDaddy across different customers,” De Aragon says, adding that small business owners are “no-nonsense” and want to know exactly what GoDaddy does and how it can help them.

There are also still perceptions that website building is costly and complicated, she says. So again, the brand is leaning into its “start for free” messaging, in which it urges people to sign up and see how easy it is to start a site, without using a credit card.

It vetted the messaging through a large panel of GoDaddy users and this type of messaging really resonated, she says.

“We are still evaluating what’s next after this,” De Aragon says, as in the fall it typically runs higher production, higher profile campaigns, typically with a celebrity endorser like De Grasse or NBA players.

According to De Aragon, recent insights reveal that boosting online sales is still really important to its target and there was a huge influx of people going online during lockdowns. Though it is not accelerating at the pace it was, it is still growing, she says.

The brand’s differentiator, she says, is its end-to-end and customer service, especially to solo entrepreneurs or ones with just a handful of employees.

The media mix is a holistic one, and the brand is leaning heavily into TV.

Long-term partner Wavemaker is behind the buy, with TV, OTT, OLV, digital, social. Periodically throughout the year, De Aragon says, it does a lot of OOH as well in markets like Montreal, Halifax, Victoria or Toronto. North Strategic did the public relations.