Well, it finally happened. Entrepreneurial golden child Groupon.com finally has to contend with some… well… contention. A series of commercials aired during the Super Bowl (at a widely-reported $3M a pop) is generating some serious response. And, if the comments on their YouTube page, blog post announcing the campaign (and basically everywhere else on the internet) are any indication, about 97% of that response is of the negative variety.
This isn’t meant to be yet another editorial piece on the content of the spot on which most of the ire is leveled- or even whether or not the spots are “on brand.” In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention here that Groupon founder Andrew Mason and I shared some time together as interns at the (controversy-free) Electrical Audio recording studio here in Chicago and I found him to be a man of equal parts humor and taste. He’s also much smarter than me, which probably explains why you’ve heard of him and not me. So I give Andrew the benefit of the doubt 100% of the time.
That being said, I’d like to express my opinion that there’s a great deal more going on with these spots than meet the eye. There’s the surface level to which a certain part of my brain immediately said, “Making light of the plight of the Tibetan people is in poor taste and I do not approve. Especially since they’re selling stupid coupons.” After a few moments of internal distress, I tried comforting myself with something akin to, “Well, I see what they were going for. A spoof of celebrity-endorsed ’cause’ commercials is both comical and long overdue.”
But it took until today, discussing it with the partners here at Fresh Giants, for the full impact to really sink in. The Super Bowl (and Super Bowl commercials) are perhaps the epitome of crass American commercialism. Companies spend millions of dollars on commercials that usually amount to 20 seconds of trying very hard to make you laugh or feel and 10 seconds of “Buy Some Doritos” tags. If a brand can get you to chuckle or “Awww” and remember what type of Doritos they were trying to sell you, the agency gives each other high fives for a week. It’s been this way for about as long as I can remember and we’ve all accepted it as a given that Super Bowl ads will be the best ads we see all year.
Groupon went a different route. They took that crass commercialism (of which they are admittedly a part) and turned it against themselves. Doritos, Volkswagens and Skittles are essentially not very important. Serious political strife in Tibet is an issue that needs discussion in earnest. That Groupon spent millions of dollars in an attempt to call out millions of Super Bowl viewers on being caught up in less important things (like coupons) and make people think about Tibet for 30 seconds is not only the most daring advertising move I’ve ever seen, it’s also probably the most selfless. This is not a popular opinion, but let’s see if I can explain.
The hundreds of furious comments on Twitter, various news articles and, yes, even Andrew’s own response all agree: No one should use the struggles of an entire culture to sell coupons. The sentiment is accurate, but they’ve chosen the wrong target. Groupon, like Doritos and Volkswagen, is just some bullshit company that sells bullshit to Americans. The ad was simultaneously mocking celebrity cause ads, crass commercialism, myopic American TV viewers and, most importantly, themselves. The original sites out of which Groupon was born (ThePoint.com, preceded by PolicyTree.com), were activism sites and, guess what. They didn’t make any money. Now Andrew has a company worth a billion dollars and, therefore, access to one of the largest megaphones in the world. He used that power to tell all of us watching the Super Bowl that coupons don’t matter. If you actually went to the site, you saw that Groupon was matching donations to the causes mentioned in the ads and are even giving Groupon credit to people who donate. Everyone’s used to commercials that exploit women, commercials for companies that exploit their workers and commercials that remind you how much you want a Coke. This commercial was the first to remind us that none of that means anything in the long run. And it may well be the last.
Many of the comments on the latest response from Andrew follow a similar theme: “Yeah, sure, I get it. But why didn’t you mention the donation stuff in the ad?” This is a valid point if you take for granted the premise that commercials exist solely to sell products. I’ll admit that I missed that point initially. This commercial wasn’t trying to sell you a coupon. It wasn’t even “selling” a cause. This ad cost Groupon three million dollars to get people talking about something that wasn’t coupons (or Doritos) and perhaps it’s more accurate to judge it on its success in that sense. It mocked its viewers, its customers and itself. To risk both cash and reputation on a gamble like that goes against every corporate bone in every corporate American body. And, while I’m sure the folks at LivingSocial are foaming at the mouth as to how to capitalize on all those negative comments on all those sites, I like to think it will succeed on some level, even if that success comes at a high price for coupons and other less important things.
Conversation is not the same as conversion. This sounds like a Balloon Boy stunt to me then from CP+B…apparently they forgot how that story ended. Let the Groupon sales records decide.
“if you take for granted the premise that commercials exist solely to sell products”
So they convinced someone to waste $3 Million just to stick it to people who donate to causes and the man? Good one. I’m pretty sure that you just lost every potential new client you would ever have, except for celebrities trying to make entertainment headlines.
I’m not sure I understand how the commercial “sticks it to people who donate to causes.” Could you elaborate on that thought and we can discuss!
It seems like one of the problems was that Groupon was indeed satirizing themselves, but the bulk of America doesn’t know who they are in the first place, and familiarity with source material is sort of an inherent piece in satire. I know what Groupon is, mostly because I’m a Chicagoan, but I still don’t know what godaddy.com is exactly and they’ve been running ads for years.
That’s a great point. My photography teacher once told me that if you have to explain your piece, it wasn’t effective. But this commercial, like photographs, are open to interpretation. I do think that Andrew misjudged the percentage of people who would interpret it the way he intended. Even people who know Groupon are misinterpreting it, so there is definitely an argument that it’s a failure in that regard.
The problem pretty much would have been solved if they’d included the line: “you can do both!” Which is pretty much what people who like to buy their way out of a social problem like to hear, e.g. the RED campaign and all that saving of Africa that was happening by purchasing Gap t-shirts.
Exactly- and I think the decision to leave out that line (that LOTS of people are saying they wish was in there somewhere) was calculated and very much intentional. Would it have killed my appreciation of the spot and my interpretation of it? Maybe a little. It would have saved a great deal of face but cost some measure of integrity when it came to (what I believe was) the intention of the spot. That’s a balancing act I do not envy.
I agree with your points. On one hand, I think they could have mentioned the donation part, yet at the same time I feel it’s not necessary due to the self-mocking nature of the campaign. There is something to be said for making the consumer think critically about commercialism, world issues, consumerism, etc.