We Meant to Do That

So as I wrote this morning, Groupon seems to have alienated much of the buy wow gear football-watching world with its commercial last night, which began as a seemingly earnest plea about the plight of Tibet and ended with Timothy Hutton describing the awesome deal he and others got at a Tibetan restaurant thanks to the online-coupon site.

Today, a PR rep for the company writes:

We wanted to clarify the intention of the Super Bowl ad yesterday. The humor was designed to draw attention to causes including Greenpeace, The Tibet Fund, and Rainforest Action Network. Collective action is in Groupon DNA and this campaign pokes fun at its own roots. Granted, you can-by visiting a website not touted in the ad itself-donate to charity. And granted, the ad was obviously meant to be funny. But it was meant to be funny by absorbing the audience in a serious message about Tibet, then cutting to a coupon deal. (Get it? We know you care more about saving on dinner than saving Tibet!) It not that viewers didn get that it was a joke. It that they saw it was an obnoxious joke.

In any case, I await the wow gold from Pepsi Max that its ads were intended to raise awareness about the threat of assault by beverage can.

Yeah, thanks, Groupon, for making me feel like an a-hole for trying to save money. Yeesh.

When I got Groupon e-mails, I always just look at the deal; I never read their write-ups of the deal because I can stand their po-mo hipper-than-thou snark-for-snark descriptions. This morning, I tried to delete my account. I couldn find a way to do that, so I settled for unsubscribing from their e-mails. This earned me a video of a supposed Groupon staff member getting yelled at and beaten by another for the sin of thought it was a good idea to send me e-mails. Followed by a screen that said you happy now, or would you like to resubscribe? Lovely. Bye, Groupon.

A commenter on the Groupon blog assumed people are upset upset b/c we think you were making fun of Tibet. That is not why I am upset.

I am bothered b/c Groupon make fun of caring about Tibet and as one commenter posted, they are promoting apathy. They made me angry the minute I saw the ad and that anger is actually growing by the ham-handed response. (Gee, sorry you are so dumb you are offended).

They should be wow items congratulated, though. How to ruin a good thing.

Hee! :-) And then the Circle of Awful would be complete! But no, IIRC, the weapon in the video was a Kleenex box. Groupon may have missed an opportunity for marketing synergy there could show you weeping into your Kleenex while pondering the plight of Tibet and then ignoring it while you happily redeem your Groupon. Yup. And, man, did Pepsi learn NOTHING from the backlash against last year raft of misogynistic ads? I felt a bit like Shirley on Community while watching that first Max ad: we all just gonna ignore this little hate crime here? I read that this year, to offset the cost of buying Super Bowl ad time, Pepsi ran a contest where people could submit and vote for the best ad ideas. I guess they got what they paid for id="dsq-comment-27592">

Groupon has released wow gold an interesting response: cloak itself in retroactive righteousness.

And yes, it true that the ads didn make me think killing whales is good. (Because, hey, I not a moron.) What the ads did do was make me want to unsubscribe from Groupon. Nothing in their response has changed my mind.

Not sure why Groupon thought the ads would be taken as the company making fun of itself; the ads came wow gold off much more as making fun of the company own consumer base (while seeming to be trivializing genocide into the bargain, no less). A consumer base the company apparently thinks is simultaneously a) meta-minded enough to get Groupon on itself and b) dumb enough to be incapable of being savvy consumers and donating to worthy causes at the same time.

And ay yi yi, don even get me started on Mason assertion that the ads that objectify women are a much bigger problem. (Guess what! It not a zero-sum game! I can be disgusted by both ads! Just because Pepsi ads were horrible doesn mean that Groupon were fine, even in comparison. Just like having used the company own product doesn make me a selfish a-hole.)
source:http://www.wowgoldpo.fr