Groupon Pulls a "Go Daddy"

Go Daddy now makes a practice of proposing Super Bowl ads racy enough to be rejected, then runs the acceptable ads on TV, with the "rejected" versions online and gets lots of incremental viewership and attention.

Groupon worked the same sort of approach and has gotten a serious bump in attention. One can argue about whether "negative" attention is a good thing or a bad thing, but there is an argument that even arguably "negative" attention is still valuable. Chitika data shows the spike in online traffic for Groupon and its ads.

If one measures success on the "branding" benefits, with traffic as a proxy, it worked.