For a Goofed Cause

It's not like us at Drink Moxie to simply jump on the bandwagon and comment on what everyone else is talking about in the world of advertising. But this one is just too interesting to pass up.

The Super Bowl has come and gone, and with it the year's most expensive and heavily-produced television commercials. It was the usual assortment of beers, cars, talking babies and "Go Daddies." But the real attention-getter was a rare series of television spots for the internet-based phenom Groupon. Here was the one that I saw.



There were three ads in the series. The one I didn't see, and can't find a clean web version of, links the subjugation of Tibet with Tibetan restaurants. The third, which I'm not sure ever aired except online, is this.



If you were paying attention, you already know the aftermath. After a very public apology, Groupon announced that they were pulling the campaign (which we learned was by that perennial envelope-pushing ad shop, Crispin Porter + Bogusky). Also, while the apparent intent of the ad was to poke fun at social cause-based advertising, there was also a philanthropic component to the campaign   one that was not featured in the TV commercials, but could be found online.

What does this fiasco tell us? Well, first, it reveals that while humor in advertising   however tasteless   is generally acceptable, satire can be pretty risky. Especially when there's some question about what is actually being satirized. Was this campaign making fun of social causes? The people who objected to it, and prompted the retraction, certainly seemed to think so.

When I first saw this, I read it a little differently, because it highlighted something that had been troubling me for some time. In the past several years, as we (and the people who sell us things) have discovered that today's young consumers have a particular appetite for social causes (climate change, deforestation, diseases in developing countries, and so forth   mostly, things that are pretty distant from the American experience), virtually every large purveyor of consumer products has integrated a philanthropic or cause-based component to their advertising campaigns. The change has actually been fairly staggering. Corporate philanthropy is nothing new, to be sure, but can you think of a company in the 1990s that touted a social cause in its advertising campaign? Seriously, if you think of one, let us know. (Ben & Jerry's doesn't count.)

Probably the most prominent example of this is the RED campaign, which encompasses many of today's top brands, and ensures that a portion of the sales profits go toward "fighting AIDS in Africa" (actual contributions vary, but in many cases they are significant). The hook to this campaign is that it doesn't just provide financial support, it combines conspicuous consumption with social consciousness   consumers can literally wear their cause on their clothes. Wearing a Gap RED t-shirt shows that you are socially conscious in the same way that wearing a t-shirt with a large Calvin Klein logo showed that you were fashion-conscious in the '90s.

Another example, one more directly associated with Super Bowl advertising, is the Pepsi Refresh campaign. You can find more detail about this at the link, but basically in 2010 Pepsi decided (very publicly) that it would forgo buying Super Bowl ad time and, instead, give out the money in grants to social causes. Also, in a unique combination of marketing, social consciousness, and social media, the grants would be given competitively to proposals from the general public based on an online voting system. They're doing it again this year, although those of you paying attention might have noticed that there were a number of Super Bowl spots for Pepsi Max, along with various other PepsiCo products (Doritos, for instance).

You could look at these campaigns, and the messages they send, in different ways. In one sense, they show that social consciousness is an important part of popular culture and is therefore an appropriate element of consumer culture. It shows that it's good for consumers and companies alike to think about the well-being of the global community when making their purchasing choices. And by fitting into the competitive landscape of marketing, it encourages other companies to do the same thing. Overall, benign.

But to look at it in a slightly different way, it sends a message that social consciousness is good, but only as long as it fits into the consumer structure that companies have worked so hard to build over many years. To pick on Pepsi (because it's easy), it might be great that they are giving money toward social causes, but what if the really important cause is to combat childhood obesity by getting kids to stop drinking Pepsi? An American Express RED card might be a great thing, but what if the better thing for the world would be for us to save more of our money and charge less to our credit cards, thus leaving us with more money that we could give to charity?

As much as we might care about the importance of advertising in our culture, I think that we've learned over many years of ads for cigarettes, sodas, and SUVs that we have to be careful when advertisers try to tell us what's good for us. So we should be appropriately skeptical when they start telling us what's good for the world.

Which brings us back to the Groupon ads. Were they being offensive by trivializing what many view to be important social causes? Or were they being refreshingly honest by saying, "Look, we know that these causes are important, but they really don't have anything to do with our business." And was the backlash because people really thought the commercials were harmful to the causes, or was it because they weren't toeing the line established by today's big businesses when it comes to "serious" socially conscious advertising? (Even though they were, albeit in a less conspicuous and more subversive way.)

If it's the latter, then it's worth pondering whether this social consciousness is really part of a new corporate culture, or if it's a fad that will fade away when young consumers get over their "do-gooder phase." If so, then maybe this ad wasn't too offensive, it was just too soon.