The archive · Advertising · Marketing decision · 2024–2025
GoDaddy's actor-led glasses brand 'Act Like You Know' proves Airo — Cannes Grand Prix
GoDaddy has Walton Goggins run a real goggle-glasses business built with its AI tool Airo — then advertises that proof.
GoDaddy
What it had to solve
GoDaddy was returning to Super Bowl advertising after an eight-year break to launch Airo, its AI-powered brand builder for small businesses — a category and format where audiences tune out technical B2B pitches.
How it works
GoDaddy needed a launch for Airo, its AI-powered experience that helps small business owners build a logo, website, social presence and commerce setup. The category is dry and the company was returning to the Super Bowl after eight years, so a conventional software pitch would have been ignored.
With agency Quality Meats, GoDaddy made the demo the entertainment: actor Walton Goggins launched his own real brand, Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses, built entirely with Airo — logo, website, social copy, order and shipping emails. The store took its first order within an hour of going live. A Super Bowl spot then showed Goggins playing roles he can fake (detective, astronaut, racecar driver) while confessing he has no idea how to run a business — 'but GoDaddy Airo does.'
The campaign lifted Airo's traffic 87%, drew more than three million US customers to Airo as it rolled out across 180 countries, and sold real glasses. At Cannes Lions 2025 it won the Creative B2B Grand Prix, with the jury crediting a universal human insight, humor in a traditionally straight-laced category, and measurable business impact.
Why it lands
- The demo is the campaign: a real store, real logo and real emails — nothing staged, so the proof cannot be argued with.
- A famous face gave an abstract AI product a concrete, watchable outcome that earned press beyond ad trade outlets.
- The humor ('I have no idea what I'm doing') made a B2B pitch feel human instead of technical.
- TV, social, out-of-home and live commerce turned one ad into a year-round platform for the product.
What it did
Airo traffic rose 87%; more than 3M US customers engaged with Airo as its rollout reached 180 countries; the glasses genuinely sold; the campaign won the 2025 Cannes Lions Creative B2B Grand Prix.
What you can take
A product demo is strongest when it is a real, functioning business that a famous person actually runs — the proof itself becomes the campaign.
Since then
Walton Goggins Goggle Glasses kept operating as a real business built on Airo, and the campaign became a year-round platform for GoDaddy rather than a one-off Super Bowl spot. Airo's rollout spanned 180 countries with more than three million US customers engaging with it. The work won the 2025 Cannes Lions Creative B2B Grand Prix, and GoDaddy's marketing leadership framed it as repositioning the brand as an AI-powered partner for entrepreneurs.
Sources
- Walton Goggins and His Goggles Star in GoDaddy Super Bowl Teaser
- Go Daddy: Act Like You Know (case study)
- Cannes Lions 2025 Grand Prix Winners in Creative B2B, Creative Data, Direct, Media, PR, and Social & Creator
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