media, culture, Groupon

[miss_chance]

Groupon has four television commercial out right now that are the focus of a lot of discussion and controversy. If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you can watch them on Groupon's site, but before you do it's worth noting that these commercials aired *without* the key piece of information you get when you watch them there. Notably, while

Comments

[fennel]

In the Tibet ad (I haven't watched the others), I didn't read the 'turn' as showing any self-awareness. I mean, apparently there was some! But it didn't look that way, which makes the donations kind of irrelevant to whether the ads are okay, because seeing the ad doesn't really give you a cue that there's more to the story.

[miss_chance]

I guess the question is whether the 'turn' and the 'self-awareness' have to happen within the initial video ad, or whether the intent is that it happens later, in facebook-blogs-etc. Does an ad end at the end of the 30 seconds? Can something that happens (and one might suppose was intended to happen) outside of that 30 seconds make what happens inside it more (or less?) okay?

[fennel]

After the fact, maybe-- as in, I can imagine forgiving a company for an insulting ad if they apologized afterward, even if it was a practical impossibility for the apology to reach *everyone* who'd been hurt by the ad.

But not even trying to bring those two groups into sync (the people who have grounds to hold the original ad against the company, and the people who hear the thing that makes it right, whether the fix is apologizing, or explaining something that was easy to misunderstand, or revealing charitable intentions) makes it very hard for me to feel like they can reasonably insist other people draw that connection when judging their actions.

[miss_chance]

Yeah. As I said elsewhere, whatever game they're playing it's a dicey one. It *seems* that they're relying a lot on word-of-keyboard, as an inherent part of their strategy, which seems like a huge risk. To me it's mostly fascinating.

[crazybone]

I think it's more of dig at the cultural artifact of "celebrity supports cause X, thus cause X is a worthy cause" shilling. Growing up I remember the Sally Struthers commercials and the jokes people made making fun of it.
At a certain point the celebrity cause du jour commercial became ubiquitous and the visual equivalent of white noise. This is just using that expectation that it's another one of these to do a twist. I was kind of "meh" on how funny they were. Not necessarily offended, but then it takes quite a bit for me to get offended so I'm not a good test case here. Though there are ads that kind of shock me and I may find offensive it's been a while. I'm not big on Groupon and I'm still not.