Fellow MDC Partners agency Crispin, Porter and Bogusky is starting a rough week. Groupon has announced that they are “firing” CP+B for the controversial Superbowl ads. After reading the AdAge article, I had to say something, because AdAge totally neglected to speak to how much extra earned media Groupon got in the wake of the controversy. Here’s the comment I posted to the AdAge site:
The only big problem with those ads was that CP+B neglected to call attention to Groupon’s efforts to help those causes. If they’d called out Groupon’s matching donations to Greenpeace, Tibet et al, then the ads would have been seen as satire of society’s willful ignorance of world problems, not as insensitivity. Groupon’s “put our money where our mouth is” practices of donating their own profits to those causes could have changed everyone’s perception of those ads.
Also, how much earned media did Groupon get from these ads? Any estimates? By publicly “firing” CP+B now, they get the proverbial “having and eating it too” scenario. They got exposure to a new audience through the Superbowl ads (and the ads DID clearly explain the product), plus millions of impressions in mainstream news as people responded to the ads. I find the timing of CP+B’s “dismissal” a little overly strategic. If Andrew Mason was really upset over CP+B’s treatment of his brand, and thought that he was oversold on the ads by his agency, he should have fired them two days after the Superbowl…not taken advantage of a wave of publicity that garnered him millions of impressions while he defended the ads. Now that the hullabaloo has died down, Mason gets to be BACK in the news publicly denouncing the agency. It seems like he’s double-dipping here on news coverage pertaining to the original commercials.
I’m not sure if I should actually be denouncing Groupon though. Impressions are impressions, and they have accumulated A LOT of them for free. In 2011, earned media is the only way to make a Superbowl investment back out. Could it be that Groupon saw this, and when their ads didn’t go viral for being clever, they decided to use news media to get those eyeballs and raise their awareness?
Personally, I believe firing CP+B immediately after the Super Bowl would have been a reactionary and emotional response rather than one based on thoughtful consideration and analysis of whether CP+B was the right agency for Groupon. Groupon is extremely data driven, so perhaps they waited to collect enough data after the Super Bowl to make a decision on the impact of the CP+B’s work.
Also, I don’t believe that the firing of CP+B necessarily puts Groupon back on the forefront of consumer attention. Few consumers know or care what ad agency a company uses. It’s big news in our industry, but it’s likely not even an afterthought among the majority of Groupon’s loyal membership or potential users.
Comment by Tommy — March 21, 2011 @ 9:52 am
[...] is still on them. The folks at Groupon & Crispin Porter missed the boat when it came to highlighting Groupon’s charitable efforts regarding Tibet and the whales. I’m hoping Entenmann’s takes advantage of [...]
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