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What does the Groupon IPO have to do with print? Or maybe we should say, what does print have to do with the Groupon IPO? In a word: Eric Lefkofsky. That would be the Eric Lefkofsky who founded Innerworkings.
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About Gail Nickel-Kailing
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Discussion
By Chuck Gehman on Jun 07, 2011
Good coverage Gail, and extremely important for printers to understand.
During a session I moderated at DSCOOP6 (http://www.dscoop.org) in February, I asked the standing room only crowd for a show of hands of how many were familiar with Groupon, and if anyone saw it as a threat to print.
I wasn't shocked that few raised their hands, but was glad to see a handful of people upfront nodding their heads in agreement.
The thing is, it's not just coupons-- it's a bigger chunk of the print advertising space that is under threat from this. And there's not much that can be done about it. And there are several others similar to Groupon that are also growing by high double and triple digits, like Living Social and ideeli.
It's another massively disruptive paradigm shift, and rather than lamenting it, we either need to find a way to participate or move on to applications where print still makes sense.
Like in Yeaf Wang's China!! ;-)