Wednesday, February 09, 2011

The Groupon Advertisement

Notwithstanding my bash of him yesterday, I like Lawrence O'Donnell and watch his show regularly. I find him likable and charming, and thoroughly enjoy his unabashed liberalism. He is an intelligent and well spoken person and, most all of the time, a credit to his profession.

Last night he did a segment on the Groupon commercials in which he points out that they were not belittling the plight of Tibetans and their culture, nor the loss of Amazonian rain forest, but were using their commercial airtime to call attention to those issues before segueing into ads for their product. Watch his discussion; his point is well made.

He also does one of his more charming verbal flubs in that clip and makes one of the most poised recoveries I've seen, displaying his extemporaneous speaking skill. "You can see why I would trip over that. It's not a phrase on the prompter every night."

To Groupon, I would say a couple of things. I appreciate your intention, but the segue from social message to commercial could certainly have been made more gracefully, and I strongly suspect that your message was far, far to subtle for the football watching audience.

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