Daily Deal Site Owner Challenges Groupon CEO to Boxing Match
Researching daily deals lately I stumbled across this funny video where a daily deal site owner challenged the CEO of Groupon to a boxing match. The guy requesting the boxing match was Brian Thomas of Cashoff.com.
Granted this video came out last year, but it shows a funny side to the kind of marketing ideas that small businesses can come up with.
What makes it even funnier is that in the video at least, Mr Thomas looks to me like a mob boss! Of course, he's not though, and in the video he does make a good point that many small businesses just can't run deals on these sites when they will only end of up 24% of the deal to cover costs.
Unfortunately the Groupon CEO did not respond to the video, so the match did not take place. The whole thing is really just a marketing stunt designed to get CashOff more attention. It wouldn't have been a good idea for Groupon to give free publicity to a small competitor.
A better fight would have been between Groupon's Original CEO Andrew Mason and The Living Social Original CEO Tim O'Shaughnessy (both now departed the companies). These sites are the number 1 and 2 positioned daily deal sites on the world rankings. That would have been a good fight, and great publicity for both. But Groupon fighting an unknown site owner, it wouldn't happen :)
Still the video generated some publicity for the small site CashOff, so it worked, even if the result wasn't what Mr Thomas was hoping for :)
