Daily deals site Groupon has joined the tech billboard wars in an effort to bulk up staff at its West Coast office. Groupon PR representative Julie Mossler tells me it’s looking to hire over 100 developers and technologists at its 409 Sherman Avenue location in Palo Alto by the end of this year — Specifically in data, analytics, networking, mathematics and Ruby on Rails.
“We’re investing in Palo Alto as a tech hub,” said Mossler. “We’re still hiring here [in homebase Chicago] for devs, but Andrew’s always said publicly that the talent pool here is shallow, so it makes sense to invest out there.”
Billboard campaigns on the 101 are said to run in the 30K range and have been most famously utilized by Zynga. In this specific campaign a Groupon billboard with a discreet G went up on Paul Avenue near the Cesar Chavez exit on March 9th (below). The big push happened on March 21st, with the “Do Something Massive : TECH JOBS IN PALO ALTO — Groupon.com/techjobs” tagline unveiled just yesterday. The campaign will run until July and the company plans to set up more billboards shortly.
Groupon has 2,000 employees in its Chicago offices, another 3,000 in its affiliate offices around the world. Groupon also has the cash in its coffers to hire, having gone through a $950 million venture round back in January, with rumors of an IPO by the end of this year. Its most recent valuation was reported by Bloomberg to be $25 billion.
Groupon, whose core product can be thought of in and of itself as a form of marketing, has had a mixed history with ad campaigns — Notably pulling its consumer-facing Super Bowl campaign after a wave of backlash. Mossler tells me that the billboard campaign has been successful so far, “The office has been getting a lot off attention.”
Those interested can visit http://www.groupon.com/techjobs
