Friday, April 8, 2011

This is how you make an ad to sell a "GroupOn" type service:

GroupOn last week fired the ad agency who created the now infamous ad which conveyed a message to the 100 million Americans watching the Super Bowl that GroupOn thinks the plight of the Tibetans is fucking hilarious.

(GroupOn actually does a lot of charity efforts, read my post from back in February for why I think this ad was really badly executed. Or read my follow up post. Yes I've covered it a lot, almost as much as the man your man could smell like from old spice. A company dropping an ad campaign they spent tens of millions of dollars on is big news around this parts.)

So the latest was GroupOn fired the agency responsible and made a public statement distancing themselves form the agency. (I believe GroupOn's statement was: "Everyone at this ad agency are a bunch of assholes." [citation needed]*) See the Ad Age article here if you are interested in the actual facts.

Roger Ebert once said the best way to critique a film is to make a better one.** And in the case of GroupOn style deal sites, someone had already made a much better ad for another deal of the day/ social buying website. To this end I offer to GroupOn's dumped agency this awesome LivingSocial.com ad:



This ad does a much better job of showing the viewer the wide variety of things one can save on by using the site, and it still conveys this information in a humorous and stylized way.

I love the clever props they use for this ad. My favorite part is the man dressed in red who spins the couple at the end. Using Michel Gondryesque props and traditional live theater techniques really give this ad a lot of heart and humor, as well as an eye catching look.

Major props to Ken for sending me the Ad Age article and suggesting pretty much every topic I covered in this post.

Footnote(s):

*I stole that citation needed gag from cracked.com
**I think ebert was quoting someone else when he said this, but I read it in his book "Your Movie Sucks" and I don't feel like looking up who he was quoting.

2 comments:

  1. Has anyone drawn similarities yet to the old spice single shot ads.

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  2. @CS: Good point about the Old Spice ads. I meant to mention those. What is interesting about comparing and contrasting the Living Social ad with Old Spice is that ads use a similar gimmick in the opposite way, since the old spice ads are about being amazed because you know they did the whole ad in camera, but it all looks like digital effects, where as these as are supposed to be charming because it is so obvious how all the effects are done.

    Though as much as I like the living social ad I did feel cheated re-watching the ad and realizing there is in fact a cut in it, where as all the old spic ads are actually done in one shot.

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