Marketing Briefing: What’s on marketers’ minds — changing consumption habits, AI search ads and more — with GoDaddy CMO Fara Howard

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

The traditional marketing playbook is being rewritten. Consumption habits continue to shift so where you’re spending your ad dollars has to shift, too. What does today’s playbook look like for you?

The playbook is changing as we speak, right? Certainly traditional channels are playing a role, but they’re not the only tactics that we employ. Social media is a critical part of how we go to market. What’s so important on that channel is that we’re letting our customers tell our story. [It’s not just] us telling our story. Putting our customers in the middle of our advertising is so important, because people want to see themselves in the ads. I shouldn’t even call them ads. The expectation is not that everything is polished, pretty and pushed out, but that people are capturing content live on their phones, telling real stories that feel a little bit — maybe gritty’s the wrong word — but incredibly real.

Commercials have their place but I think that story has to really be amplified in other spaces, with lots of voices to make sure that the word gets out and is heard.

When you say customers are in the ads, are you talking about using more user-generated content (UGC)? Or are you reaching out to content creators to make ads?

It’s both. There absolutely is UGC content that, when we find it, we’ll reach out and say, “Hey, can we repost or can we tell this story? Can we tell your story?” There are small business owners whose stories we’re really compelled by. We’ll reach out and be like, “Hey can we amplify your story on social media?” And then there are partnerships that we’ll build like we did with Walton Goggins and his Goggle Glasses [business], that then becomes part of a bigger campaign. So it really varies.

When you’re dividing the media budget for today’s marketing playbook, what does that look like? Is it like 20% for traditional TV now? With the rest split across digital and social channels?

It truly varies based on performance. We’ve historically been really good at what I’d call capturing demand. A lot of these terms are — I probably sound like a dinosaur when I say things like “lower funnel” or “upper funnel” —  but we’ve been very, very skilled in search engine marketing. If you type in a lot of the keywords that are tied to the digital entrepreneur, website, logo, domain, you’ll certainly see GoDaddy popped to the top of that list. We want to be present there when people are searching.

We spend a sizable amount of our media making certain that we get to tell stories, too. And by stories, I mean real stories. That’s where places like YouTube, TV, TikTok and Instagram can be really valuable because you have a little bit more time than reading a line and in your Google query with searching marking standpoint.

Let’s talk about search. That’s another area that’s changed drastically in recent years, given the use of AI. Consumers’ search habits have shifted. Are you exploring AI search ads since search is so important to you?

We are. Search is changing in real time because of AI. Staying close to what’s changing, trying to understand the drivers of search queries, and what pops your brand to the top of the list. As you know, search tools and AI tools are ingesting more data and using more context to help understand what consumers are looking for [now]. All of that is changing in real time and we’re staying super close to it and learning along with every other brand and marketer. Experimentation in search, and experimentation overall with AI, is high right now.

When you’re experimenting, how much of your ad budget are you dedicating to those tests? Do you have a set 5%-10% to experiment? Or is it more fluid than that?

It’s more fluid, but we do reserve dollars for experimentation. [We’re reserving] enough dollars to matter, so that you can show up in a channel and actually get a signal. We do a lot of live testing on platforms where you can measure the signal, like for a view-through [conversion] channel or a last click channel. We also do a lot of lift testing. I am really trying to understand how this channel does. How does a traditional channel impact? Experimentation is a huge part of our culture. … We’re learning in real time with the data that we get from the platforms and from our own sales data as well as doing more robust tests like lift tests and trying to understand how individual channels impact overall performance.

When it comes to AI search ads, is there anything you’ve learned so far about what works and what doesn’t?

What we’re learning right now with search advertising and the impact of AI is — I say it’s unsurprising, but maybe it is surprising to others — is historical search advertising was heavily influenced by your spend from a search engine marketing standpoint and your metadata from an SEO standpoint. And so you as a brand had a lot of control around how you showed up in search. And that control is likely going to be disrupted, right? If you look at AI in general, it’s ingesting huge amounts of information. What others are saying about you matters greatly. [For example,] editorial content is of critical importance. AI is favoring it. But that may change. And so, staying on top of and trying to deduce how AI-based search will change and saying, it’s hard to stay ahead, but at least being informed is a big focus for us.

When you recognize that something like editorial content matters more to win with AI, does that then change where you’re investing resources? If editorial matters more, will you then look to invest in more branded editorial content like a magazine?

[That’s] to be determined. What we’re learning in real time in AI is that myriad different data sources are being ingested and, as a result, we’re seeing surprising context and in our feeds. We don’t have enough context yet because it’s so experimental to have made meaningful shifts in our content strategy. But what my belief is as a marketer that I’m seeing manifest, at least in my own experiences of utilizing AI tools, is having other people speak on your behalf is incredibly powerful. My belief has always been as a marketer that if I — by I, I mean, the brand — is telling the story it’s slightly less compelling than other people telling your story on your behalf. That mentality and methodology influences how we go to market regardless [of new tools like AI.]

As I reflect on the Super Bowl strategy that we just executed upon and we continue to execute upon in 2025, because it’s a year-long campaign, our assertion was by us returning to the Super Bowl, it would drive a lot of attention and a lot of people would talk about us. There would be a lot of places in spaces where GoDaddy could show up and be welcome and where they weren’t in the past. And that proved to be true. And if I draw that parallel to what’s happening in AI, we should keep doing that, right? We should continue to have other people speaking on our behalf. We should continue to editorialize our brand by getting our brand name out in lots of different places, that increases the probability through AI-based tools that GoDaddy will also show up there as well. While we’re all in real time learning what AI search will mean for our brands.

By the numbers

In a landscape where marketers are constantly tasked with doing more marketing with less marketing dollars, the industry is on the hunt for efficiency to ensure that working dollars are, in fact, working. To stand out in a crowded digital marketplace and make the best use of ad dollars, advertisers can stand out with personalization, emotional connection and AI-powered engagement, according to Braze, a customer engagement platform, and its fifth annual Customer Engagement Review report. See below for key findings:

• 79% of marketers lack confidence in understanding user preferences and sentiment — highlighting a key opportunity to leverage AI to better understand customers.
• AI is driving results for top performing brands with 41% being more likely to use AI to adjust messages based on real-time customer engagement.
• Messaging apps for customer engagement is on the rise, with 43% of marketing execs saying they’re using or planning to use apps like WhatsApp and LINE for customer engagement, slightly outpacing email at 42%. — Kimeko McCoy

Quote of the week

“There’s a temptation as industry insiders to overreact to news that hasn’t like filtered down to everyday purchase patterns. I think it’s going to be very important to keep our fingers on the pulse.”

— said Gartner analyst Andrew Frank when asked about Trump’s topsy-turvy tariffs that are keeping marketers on edge.

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