What a Dick Move, Groupon

In my opinion, ninety percent of all advertising is basically a dick move. The first priority of advertisement is not truth, but manipulation. An advertiser isn't making an argument, or conducting some sort of public economic discourse. Their job is to change your mind and overrule your own preferences. Now, at times, I don't mind this. Actually, I'll back farther off than that--I'll admit that advertising is necessary in a consumer society which, for better or worse, we are. At some point we have to pick our products, and the people making the products have a right to have their say. So, even though it drifts into all-pervasive paranoia-inducing mind control, it's a necessary evil.

That said, sometimes commercials cross over into sheer douchiness, and not just in the objectifying-women type of sense. (Note: not trivializing that.) Take, for example, this Super Bowl commercial.

Life in Tibet is hard. Thousands of them have been killed by the Chinese government. Their spiritual leader, the Dalai Llama, lives in exile--prayers mentioning him are best kept out of public. After riots in 2008, protesters were arrested and subject to treatments like food deprivation. So, yeah. That's bad. BUT HEY LOOK WHAT'S CHEAP.

The problem here should be obvious--the plight and suffering of Tibet is being exploited as a lead-in to an advertisement for a website. That said, I've seen several arguments defending them. I'd like to address those arguments.

The first, which I heard last night as this was unfolding on Twitter, was that Groupon was donating money to a pro-Tibet charity, which apparently makes it all right. I really don't think it does, though. You can't just buy off that sort of exploitation. I don't think the people of Tibet are alright with having their plight commercialized as long as they get paid a little bit. That's like a corporation defending their sweatshops by saying they fund a charity that builds schools in third-world countries. The first action is deplorable, the second laudable, but the two have no necessary connection. Groupon, if they really cared about Tibet, would have donated that money and then not made the ad, or made an ad actually about the problems in Tibet.

The next two arguments both came up as I typed this post, actually, with the people in the room around me. One guy didn't seem to see the big deal. He thought it was a work primarily parodying how Americans don't care about things. Alright, I'll admit the possibility. But if it is a parody, it should be noted that it doesn't show it. It looks exactly like a straight example of that not-caring would look. Poe's Law (it is impossible to tell the trolls from actual opinions) applies. If it was a parody--if they were aware of how ridiculous that juxtaposition is--then they did it poorly. Let's think about the good aspects of parody I just wrote about. I talked about how parody's great asset is that it helps us laugh at ourself. But this commercial doesn't really ask us to laugh at anyone, although it might be trying to milk humor from the transition. There's no indication that the narrator is at fault, nor does the commercial use the Tibetan tragedy as anything but a lead-in to their product. Sometimes we are able to transmute tragedy to comedy, true, but in this case the tragedy itself wasn't even relevant--just a discarded attention-grabber for an Internet coupon site.

At this point I laid out my position as plainly as it stands: "They're using human suffering to sell their product. That's wrong, no matter what else they do with respect to donations." I was told that lots of people do that in advertising. Maybe, maybe. Of course, that's just flat-out moral laziness, as far as arguments go. I don't watch a lot of TV, but when I watch it, I don't generally see anything quite this douchetastic. So, no, I think this is a pretty exceptional case, and worthy of attention. Fuck you, Groupon.