Washington DC based Living Social is Groupon’s largest competitor, but is less well known. In today’s splintered advertising and marketing world this shouldn’t be much of a shock to anyone. Even though Living Social does more direct advertising, Groupon has had a much larger push into the mobile market, via word of mouth, social media, and product reviews. This isn’t to say that Living Social is falling behind, it just means they are playing catch up and doing it with some very clever and unique advertising and marketing strategies.

One of Living Socials latest campaigns involves using a London Cab to spread the word virally  to its target audience.

The cab is fully branded with the Living Social logos on the outside, but the experience continues once you enter the cab. Once passengers enter the cab they are told they can continue to their normal destination, or toss a pair of virtual dice to be sent to a new random location where they could try one of the Living Social daily deals. The experience is sort of like the “Cash Cab” TV show, and according to Living Social they had about a 30% acceptance rate. A rate that is actually pretty high when you think about what they are asking busy people to do. I’m not sure how successful the campaign has been  so far but I would bet it’s been fairly high. I know the video only shows those people who accepted the challenge, but I would think even those that didn’t talked about the experience, and or posted about it on a variety of social media networks.