For a company whose message is that the internet shouldn’t feel so in-your-face, Squarespace has been a little, well, in-your-face lately — and it’s only going to get more so.
On the heels of a splashy Super Bowl commercial that continues to get a lot of play, the Manhattan-based website creation service says it’s doubling its marketing budget for 2014, to $40 million. It’s also following up the Super Bowl spot with another, quieter ad that emphasizes Squarespace’s aesthetic refinement (and plays off the viral internet’s fetish for hyper-magnified images and slowed-down footage).
The spot, which debuted yesterday, is called “Details.” ”The idea is that a Squarespace website can really capture the details that go into what creative individuals do,” says CEO Anthony Casalena.
This is it:
This year’s Super Bowl featured a relatively unmemorable crop of ads from tech brands. In part, no doubt, that’s because GoDaddy broke with its traditionof nonsensically provocative commercials packed with gratuitous eye candy. While this year’s entries included spokeswoman Danica Patrick as usual, she was wearing a prosthetic muscle suit, not her birthday suit.
“You’ve got to give it to GoDaddy over the past 10 years,” says Casalena. “They’ve made some pretty bold moves. In terms of a brand, they’re pretty much the polar opposite of Squarespace. That’s partially what our ad was about, distancing our selves not just from them but from the whole internet of shouts and scams.”
After appearing on the FORBES Most Promising Companies list in 2013, Squarespace continues to grow rapidly. In addition to doubling the marketing spend, the company will also roughly double in headcount this year, from its current 270, says Casalena. It recently launched a recruiting drive aimed at luring engineering talent to New York; it says it’s putting $18 million into the effort.
Making possible all this investment is the continued success of the product it launched in July 2012, Squarespace 6. “The new product has been working so well, we’re able to justify these spends because it really has the conversion rate and traction and word of mouth we’re looking for,” says Casalena. “It just put us on a completely different trajectory.”
Here’s Squarespace’s Super Bowl spot.