Groublogpon – The Serious Blog of Groupon

Five days have passed since the Super Bowl, and one thing is clear – our ads offended a lot of people. Tuesday I posted an explanation, but as many of you have pointed out, if an ad requires an explanation, that means it didn’t work.

We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted. We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible). We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.

To the charities (for which we expect to net over $500,000) and others that have spoken out on our behalf, we appreciate your support.

To those who were offended, I feel terrible that we made you feel bad. While we’ve always been a little quirky, we certainly aren’t trying to be the kind of company that builds its brand on creating controversy – we think the quality of our product is a much stronger message.

Thanks for taking the time to read,

Andrew

I’m extremely excited to announce that Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, has joined the Groupon Board of Directors. As CEO of one of the world’s most iconic brands, Howard is an invaluable addition to Groupon. His experience in building the culture and business of Starbucks and his relentless focus on innovation to improve customer experiences brings a unique combination of skills to our Board of Directors.

To make room for Howard and future additions to the board, a few of our existing (and fantastic) directors stepped down following our most recent round of financing. Along with Howard, the Groupon board currently consists of me, my co-founders Eric Lefkofsky (also the chairman) and Brad Keywell, Peter Barris, Kevin Efrusy, and Ted Leonsis. Stepping down will be John Walter, Harry Weller, and Jason Fried.

Everyone on our board has made major contributions to our success, so I’m extremely pleased that John, Harry and Jason will remain close to the company. John Walter, former CEO of R.R. Donnelley, taught me about the importance of culture – Groupon wouldn’t be nearly as cool a place to work if we didn’t have John. Without the support of Harry Weller from NEA, we might have never received the funding we used to conceive and grow Groupon – he’s also been our most prescient advisor, predicting trends like the rampant cloning of Groupon far before the rest of us. Jason Fried is a product genius, and will continue to help us simplify and refine our features as a member of our advisory board.

I’ve been spending the day listening to the negative feedback about our Tibet Super Bowl commercial, and want to take a crack at explaining why we created this campaign.

We take the causes we highlighted extremely seriously – that’s why we created this campaign in partnership with many hallmark community organizations, for whom we’re raising money at SaveTheMoney.org. Groupon’s roots are in social activism – we actually began as cause-based website called The Point, and we continue to use Groupon to support local causes with our G-Team initiative. In our two short years as a business, we’ve already raised millions of dollars for national charities like Donors Choose and Kiva.

When we think about commercials that offend us, we think of those that glorify antisocial behavior – like the scores of Super Bowl ads that are built around the crass objectification of women. Unlike those ads, no one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously. Not a single person watched our ad and concluded that it’s cool to kill whales. In fact – and this is part of the reason we ran them – they have the opposite effect.

The firm that conceived the ad, Crispin Porter & Bogusky, strives to draw attention to the cultural tensions created by brands. When they created this Hulu ad, they highlighted the idea that TV rots your brain, making fun of Hulu. Our ads highlight the often trivial nature of stuff on Groupon when juxtaposed against bigger world issues, making fun of Groupon. Why make fun of ourselves? Because it’s different – ads are traditionally about shameless self promotion, and we’ve always strived to have a more honest and respectful conversation with our customers. We would never have run these ads if we thought they trivialized the causes – even if we didn’t take them as seriously as we do, what type of company would go out of their way to be so antagonistic?

We took this approach knowing that, if anything, they would bring more funding and support to the highlighted causes. That’s why organizations like Greenpeace, buildOn, The Tibet Fund, and the Rainforest Action Network all decided to throw their support behind the campaign (read Greenpeace’s blog post here and the Rainforest Action Network’s post here). In fact, the feedback led us to make changes to the end of our ads that further encourage our fundraising. To that point, if the ads affected you, we hope you’ll head over to SaveTheMoney.org and make a donation (which we’ll match) – we’re hoping to raise a lot of money.

The last thing we wanted was to offend our customers – it’s bad business and it’s not where our hearts are.

After a two-year holdout, we finally decided to run real television ads. In the past, we’ve depended mostly on word-of-mouth and limited our advertising to online search for a couple of reasons. For one, we don’t know if television ads are worth the money. More importantly, television ads are such a huge creative statement, and so hard to do well, that we were worried it’d be near impossible to find an ad agency that could make ads we’d be confident in airing.

This year, we realized that in spite of how much we’d grown, a ton of people still hadn’t heard of Groupon, so we decided to give in to our Napoleon complex and invade the rest of the world with a proper Super Bowl commercial.

read more »

Groupon’s Super Bowl ad is almost here – our very first offline campaign! We just wanted to take a moment to say thanks for all of the interest and buzz. We’re dying to show it to you and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

While we can’t share our TV spots yet, we thought you’d enjoy seeing an idea that didn’t make the cut. Meet the Groupon addict.

We’re thrilled to announce two recent hires at Groupon: Jason Harinstein, SVP of Corporate Development, and Rob Grabowski, Supplies and Operations Temp.

Jason, who has a penchant for the letter ‘G,’ most recently served as Director of Corporate Development at Google. In his six years there Jason oversaw some of the company’s largest and most important deals, including Doubleclick and Feedburner. He also played a key role in building Google’s display advertising business. Jason considers himself a pseudo-Chicagoan as an alum of both Northwestern and University of Chicago, and casually flirted with the idea of being a Cubs fan as a partial ticket holder in the mid-90′s.

Rob, who has a penchant for penchants, most recently worked as an office assistant at comedy house iO Theater in Chicago. He brings a strong week’s worth of experience to Groupon, having briefly served as a Groupon temp in early January 2011. Rob will maintain a rigid package-sorting hierarchy supporting 1,200 Chicago employees while stocking Diet Coke, Vitamin Water and tiny flannel shirts in kitchens across four floors of Groupon headquarters. Rob considers himself a better Chicagoan than Jason, having moved to Chicago three years ago to spark a career in comedy. He very seriously flirts with the aspiration of playing a dead body on Law & Order. (If you can help him do that, email him at rob.grabo@gmail.com.)

Let’s give them a warm welcome – we genuinely consider these two ‘wins’ for our team.