GoDaddy Made a Super Bowl Ad About the Mistreatment of Puppies, And It Did Not Go Over Well

There are few universal truths in media. One of them is that if you are mean puppies, people are going to hate you.

GoDaddy thought they could joke about it during the Super Bowl, but they found out they were sorely mistaken. The above ad—which takes the trope of a puppy finding its way home, only to have said home actually be a puppy mill—has been ripped by animal rights advocates for making light of the mistreatment suffered by animals bred at these places, as well as trivializing the plight of dogs that are put in shelters because of puppy mills.

After lot of backlash, GoDaddy CEO Blake Irving responded via Twitter:

Thank you @animalrescuers for the candid feedback. What should have been a fun and funny ad clearly missed the mark and we will not air it.

— Blake Irving (@Blakei) January 27, 2015

A wise choice. Even if the ad really was just trying to be a parody of this Super Bowl ad from Budweiser, GoDaddy learned a valuable lesson: do not mess with puppies.

[via THR]