siliconANGLE » GroupOn on the Superbowl Ad: “My Bad.”

GroupOn on the Superbowl Ad: “My Bad.”

Jeff Nolan | February 8th
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From what we’ve heard, the Chicago-based company doesn’t believe the commercials were misguided, but rather that it made a mistake by not directing folks to a Web site, where it was raising money for certain causes and matching up to $100,000 in donations. The site,SaveTheMoney.org, should have been mentioned in the commercials instead of expecting consumers to make the jump on their own from groupon.com to a link on the side of the page. -Groupon Backpedals, AllThingsD

image Groupon has been taking a lot of heat for their Super Bowl ads… I didn’t watch the Super Bowl and have not seen the commercials in question so I really can’t comment on whether or not they come across as offensive. However, given the near unanimous negative reaction to them, yeah I would say it would be hard for Groupon to assert that these ads were anything but in poor taste and offensive to the audience they were trying to reach but there is also a “piling on” effect and I’m not going to contribute to that.

By the way, I also agree with Tricia Duryee that these ads, no matter how negatively they are reviewed, will not have an impact on Groupon. Consumers will still flock to the site and fuel their incredible growth.

What interests me is Groupon’s reaction to this, which is best summed up as the audience didn’t get our humor and our credentials in philanthropic circles are impeccable, and if a mistake was made it was not putting the website addresses for the signature organizations on the ads.

This strikes me as a pretty lame response when the entire controversy would go away with this simple statement:

“We screwed up and we’re sorry. The ads are reviewed and what we don’t pull we will edit to reflect our commitment to these issues.”

[Editor’s Note: Cross-posted at SiliconValleyWatcher. –mrh]

In the same vein:

About Jeff Nolan

My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Home About Venture Chronicles About Venture Chronicles My name is Jeff Nolan and I write Venture Chronicles. What started, in 2002, as a simple initiative to understand this thing called “blogs” that I kept hearing about has evolved into something much more significant. Along the way to becoming a bona fide blogger I started to understand the implications of user generated content. At the time I was a venture capitalist for SAP, the enterprise software company, and in my travels in the enterprise software market it became evident that blogging would be a powerful communication channel for enterprises to use, what we now call social media, and a powerful information collection mechanism for bottom up corporate intelligence. Combined with search technology, social networking software, and wikis, I was witnessing the inception of an entirely new generation of knowledge management software. I am currently the VP Product Marketing for Get Satisfaction, the simple and effective way to build online communities that enable productive conversations between companies and their customers. Over 50,000 companies use Get Satisfaction to create a social support experience, build better products, realize SEO benefits, and take advantage of brand loyalty behaviors that results in strong word of mouth marketing experiences in the market. I can be reached at jnolan-at-gmail-dot-com.
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