1693 Group Off

I deal a lot with advertising in this column. It's hard not to when you do a commentary on the everyday culture of America. Sometimes it makes you wonder.
Like recently, I drove by a billboard on the far northeast end of town. I was headed on a road back towards Lacey. The billboard was for a restaurant, but for a restaurant at the extreme southwest side of town, "Near Capitol Mall," as the billboard put it.
Capitol, by the way, was spelled wrong, with an "O" like the dome, and not with an "A" like the street and Mall. I always like it when outside advertising firms try to make their ads local and have no idea what local is. Like coincidentally, Capital Mall's outside ad firm did once when they said it was the "...biggest mall on the Olympic Peninsula."
The weirdest thing about the billboard was there's another restaurant of the same name not 3 blocks from the billboard, in the same direction I was going. Nice of them to advertise a place across town but if I was hungry I'd sure like to know about the one close by.
That ad group was off.
And speaking of a group off, so was Groupon. They disappointed the stock market with their latest earnings report, posting a $37 million loss.
Sounds like one of their advertising clients.
Oddly, their revenue more than doubled during the period, to $506.5 million. CEO Andrew Mason boldly proclaimed, "It's still the early days, we believe we are on the cusp of a great sea change in consumer behavior."
Let's see, a $37 million loss on $506 million in revenue. Wow, why does that remind me of that other sea change in behavior, um, the American mortgage bubble?
Someone needs to read the writing on the billboard.
America ya gotta love it.