February 7, 2011

Social media sites Twitter and Facebook lit up on Sunday night as many people tweeted and wrote status updates about the Superbowl and its commercials. One particular group of ads seemed to infuriate more people than it entertained though and those ads came from group coupon site GroupOn. If you happened to miss the ads you can see them here. The ads, which feature famous celebrities Elizabeth Hurley and Cuba Gooding Jr have been called “tasteless” and “irresponsible” by many in the social media world because of their content. Each of the 3 commercials have the celebrities talking about serious issues such as; Tibet, Rain Forests and Whaling in a saddened state and then suddenly becoming happy when talking about the money they saved on GroupOn.

I myself posted this tweet the second I saw the ad about Tibet, “Aren’t the Tibetan ppl actually struggling? That GroupOn commercial was in really bad taste. Didn’t like it at all.” Many seemed to be feeling the same way on both Twitter and Facebook with many posts speaking about GroupOn in a very negative way. Even as I write this post I’m reading tweets like; “I wonder how people’s image of Groupon after the #superbowl will impact biz? Will people care enough to switch to other daily deal sites?” and “I don’t quite get Groupon’s sense of humor and how it ties in with these pro-social campaigns.” I’ve even seen people go as far as try to start the hashtag #dontgroupon. The ads have even received the worst rating on this Brand Bowl 2011 site.

I’m really not sure what they were thinking with these ads? If they wanted to get people talking, well done. If they were hoping to get more people to sign up to their social group coupon site, we’ll have to see if that happens. So far it seems like a $3 million mistake to me.