Last night on his TBS talk show, Conan O’Brien decided to take it upon himself to make a Groupon advertisement even more offensive than the one the company aired during the Super Bowl, which as everyone knows made light of the situation in Tibet.
Conan’s ad, which features the Hindenburg disaster as a lead-in to Blimpie’s subs, might actually be funnier and, because it is so outrageous, still less offensive than the Groupon commercial, which the company announced it is pulling from the air today. As it turns out, the causes the Groupon ads seemed to trivialize actually were causes the company was matching donations for on their website. As the ad never mentioned the company’s charitable donations, they were (rightly) seen as being in poor taste.
Due to their controversial content, Groupon’s first television advertisements seems to have made quite a splash, but for all of the wrong reasons. Will the inappropriate ads hurt Groupon’s legacy forever, or at least slow their rapid growth? In any case, if you stay watching TBS’ Conan feed after the Groupon spoof, you will see two more actual Groupon ads, one featuring Elizabeth Hurley comparing deforestation to a bikini wax and another featuring Cuba Gooding Jr. favor going whale watching over actually saving whales.