Sometimes, perhaps there really is no such thing as bad publicity. Group-buying web startup Groupon, one of the hottest tech companies around, made a splash with three Super Bowl ads that were extremely memorable… because they were extremely offensive.
Criticism of Groupon’s ads – which appeared to make fun of the political and social unrest in Tibet and the destruction of Brazil’s rainforests – has been rocketing around the web today. But in the end, perhaps Groupon has gotten the last laugh.
We went back a week to see how many people were searching for Groupon, and compared it with the evening of the Super Bowl. On Jan. 30th, searches for Groupon made up about 0.002% of traffic through the Chitika network. After the controversial ads, that number shot up more than five times, to 0.011%.
The bottom line in advertising is often said to be eyeballs and awareness, and while they certainly came off as tasteless, Groupon’s ads did boost awareness 5x. Combine that with the massive amount if (mostly negative) press, and the number of people who have heard of Groupon today is much, much bigger than the number who had heard of them before yesterday.
Now, we’ll just see how effective making a nation uncomfortable is as a marketing ploy.
Here’s the Tibet commercial, in case you haven’t seen it, and as of this posting it’s got over 70,000 views on YouTube:
What do you think? Offensive? Not offensive? And does it change your opinion about Groupon in general?
The video you embedded was removed from Youtube for copyright violations. Try finding another one (Hulu also hosts all the Superbowl ads if that helps).