07 Feb Go Groupon!
My first reaction when I saw the Groupon Elizabeth Hurley/rainforest ad was, like a lot of people, YUCK. Then I saw the ad with Timothy Hutton and wondered what the Dalai Lama would think? Would he say, as my friend Dan Buettner told me long ago, that “bad press is like bad breath – it’s better than no breath at all”? Or would His Holiness be offended? Seems as the folks at the Miami New Times think we should all be aghast at these ads.
I think differently. I think the Dalai Lama (and all the other causes involved struggling to get their points communicated in a clutter of non-profit messaging) are thrilled today. Does it trivialize the problem? Perhaps it does but it also got their most important talking points across to millions of people who probably did not know the extent of the problem. And I imagine those ads (and those messages) will get played millions of times over as people like me debate whether or not these ads were offensive. That is brilliant. And that’s how marketing works. What do you think?
Miss the ads? Here’s the Timothy Hutton/Tibet ad for Groupon