Marketing Pilgrim Published: “Groupon Cries Uncle and Pulls Ads” plus 2 more

Groupon Cries Uncle and Pulls Ads
Oops! Mobile Users Don’t Mean to Click
Searches on Bing: This Time, It’s Personal

Posted: 11 Feb 2011 05:16 AM PST

Groupon is trying to close the book on a very interesting week if you are into reputation management.

To summarize:

Groupon runs ads on Super Bowl that appear to make light of certain social causes
There is a public "outcry" regarding the ads
Battle lines are drawn but most people think the ads are a mistake at best and an incredibly stupid move at worst
Groupon gets more free press than anyone if you don't mind your brand being associated with the words insensitive, arrogant, pompous etc etc (along with an occasional 'brilliant' to be fair)
Top ad agency Crispin Porter takes shots as well for creating the ads
Groupon CEO Andrew Mason posts his view on the situation on the Groupon blog and gets more heat for the post's attitude and lack of a real apology for the ads
More free press from traditional media and bloggers that at least mention the Groupon brand. Once again it depends on what you read if the associated words describing the company are naughty or nice
CEO Mason tries to put a final nail on the situation with a post that again falls short of an apology and has the air of "You people just don't get it do you?" although a bit less so than the first post.

Here is what he said

ONE LAST POST ON THE SUPER BOWL

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

So this draws to a close a memorable week for the high profile company, to say the least. Honestly, I don't know what the end result was because I seriously doubt that many people cancelled the daily e-mail updates they receive from Groupon. People like to throw a fit but in this day and age no one needs to know whether you actually did anything about it.

Personally, I unsubscribed more because I was a bit creeped out by Joe Hall's apparent ESP capabilities (Check out his post here at MP the day BEFORE the Super Bowl. Until then I never thought about what it would look like to unsubscribe from Groupon. Weird, Joe. Weird.).

Does this mean that I won't go back? Not at all and I admit that. I have the same short memory that most have when it comes to stuff like this.

What will trail Groupon on this one is the rehashing of the event around next year's Super Bowl. Now, Groupon may have lucked out on this one because the way it looks right now, even the big game's fate is in jeopardy. Wouldn't that just be Groupon's luck to have this happen like that.

So Pilgrims, in the end what is your assessment of the 'Groupongate'? Was this a major brand damaging event or was it much ado about nothing? Maybe it's somewhere in between. I say that no one wants to be a reputation management case study for how not to do it. The bigger lesson may be that even in the online space the truth of "this too shall pass" is bigger than a blunder like this.

Your thoughts?

Oops! Mobile Users Don’t Mean to Click

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 05:12 PM PST

Oops, I did it again, and again and again. Me and forty-seven percent of mobile application users who responded to a recent Harris Interactive survey click on mobile ads more often by mistake than we do on purpose.

That’s a lot of wasted coin-for-click and as Mobile Marketer points out in their review of the situation, it’s got to stop.

With the high incidence of accidental clicks, advertisers cannot continue to use traditional online ad units and measurement models – namely banners and click-through rates – as a way to deploy and measure the success of mobile campaigns.

We all know that each medium demands its own specialized form of advertising, and with it, system of measurement, but we continue to treat mobile as if it were just a tiny version of the internet. It’s not. People do things on their phones that they don’t do online and vice versa.

Mobile is about action. It’s about moving forward and getting things done. Even when it’s entertaining, it’s still about providing information in a fast, compact, high impact way.

What the survey suggests is that mobile marketers are better off using ads that require more input than just clicking on them. Asking users to enter their email address or zip code assures that they’re interested (at least at the moment) in what they’re asking for, not just clicking through when they meant to click somewhere else.

The Harris study also found that 71% of mobile users preferred to stay in an app when they clicked instead of being sent out to a web browser and 95 percent of mobile application users have downloaded free apps and 41 percent use paid app. All of this suggests that you’d be much better off spending your ad dollars developing an informative, branded app, than in producing more graphical clickables.

It’s time we got serious about using something other than click-throughs as a measure of success. Isn’t 100 email sign-ups worth more than 1,000 random clicks? So let’s stop paying for clicks and pay for action instead.

Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

Searches on Bing: This Time, It’s Personal

Posted: 10 Feb 2011 03:24 PM PST

“With the launch of Personalized Search, you can use that search history you’ve been building to get better results. You probably won’t notice much difference at first, but as your search history grows, your personalized results will gradually improve.”

Oh wait, that’s from Google’s blog back in 2005. Let me try again.

“We're introducing a feature that helps Bing present the most relevant website based on an individual's previous searches.”

Oh, okay. Bing is using “previous searches” which obviously isn’t the same as the a fore mentioned “search history” that Google uses. Did we mention that Bing is also included localized search results, now so you don’t have to type in your city when you’re craving pizza? One problem. When I type in pizza, Bing wants to send me to a town twenty minutes from here and Google wants to send me up the street. Looks like Bing still has some refining to do.

Bing is now a personalized search engine and I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement but their blog announcement makes it sound like they’re the only ones working on the idea.

Says Bing:

The beauty of thinking differently about personalized searching is that it enables us to construct elegant solutions that require a minimal amount of personal information and, frankly, often exhibit better results than a more computationally complex predictive model alone.

Bing says their new personalized search program differs from Google’s in the fact that it’s not an all or nothing system. They say they’re working to define when personalization works and when it doesn’t.

Can Bing come up with a plan that returns more relevant returns more often than Google does? I see visions of search boxes that refuse to give me the location of the nearest McDonalds because I need to go on a diet. Movie requests that show only the films the search engine deems worthy of my time. And if I look up something adventurous like sky diving – the single phrase, “you’ve got to be kidding” takes over my screen.

Search results and drop downs are already creepy enough. I swear Google now reads my mind offering options based on a conversation I just had with my husband in the privacy of our own home. How much more personal can search get? It already feels like Big Brother, Google and now Bing, are watching.