So if you read the ad press, you’ll see the industry is going mental about the phenomenon that is groupon.
Seriously, some of them are treating it like it’s the second coming of Jesus [though it feels like they think it’s the second coming of the bloke with the beard every bloody week] and yet, in a sickeningly familiar pattern, adland is ultimately hundreds of years out-of-date even though they are trying their best to look like they’re on the cutting edge of everything.
The concept of groupon is not new.
In fact it’s one of the founding principals of trade – and while I appreciate technology [and the groupon company] have enabled more people to benefit from it in easier and more convenient ways, to claim it is a completely new approach just shows how out-of-touch adland [especially the digital fraternity] are.
I suppose what saddens me more is that for all the talk of being ‘media neutral’ and ‘business centric’, adland didn’t leverage this idea years ago.
Mind you, maybe they did and they had the rug pulled from underneath them by a client who views any concept requiring them to offer a financial incentive as the ultimate insult, even if you could give them sales that would dramatically raise their share [and profit].
I can say this from personal experience because way back in 1997, I developed a concept for WPP and Unilever called Sampleshop.
We’re not walking with dinosaurs, we’re working with them.
Without going into all the details, it was a program that was designed to drive shoppers to disproportionately purchase Unilever products over competitor brands and give Unilever the ability to create/change offers in real time so they could maximise efficiencies with stock and distribution.
And do you know what they said?
Yep, they said no.
NO!
Not – I should point out – because they thought it wouldn’t work … oh no … but because they thought it would work too well.
Yep, some analyst had determined/decided that the amount of short-term profit would cost them was detrimental to their market value, even though we had done [well, we had got someone to do it for us] analytics to demonstrate the benefits of offering an additional few % discount in our particular channel was enormous based on how many more people we would be driving to purchase.
I shouldn’t complain because I got paid for the idea – but it still bugs me that adland gets slammed for not developing business focused ideas when often they do and the reason they don’t happen is because the clients ego gets in the way.
Hang on, I’ve gone from slagging off agencies to blaming it all on clients …
How did that happen?
Oh I know, because I wrote this post and I can go off at angles even a protractor would be jealous of.
Anyway, groupon is a nice idea, but like social media, it’s not new so the sooner the ad industry stops trying to be at the cutting edge of things that aren’t actually at the cutting edge of anything – and gets back to what they’re brilliant at [apart from long lunches and delusion] – the sooner we might start reminding business about our real skill and value.