It’s been a little more than 24 hours since Groupon aired the most offensive advertising campaign in history, and the company’s response to the outpouring of negative commentary has been a textbook example of how not to handle a crisis.

The Groupon ads, which were intended to be parodies, used celebrities to stage mock public service announcements that ended in pitches for Groupon’s coupon service. In the day since the ads were aired, we’ve learned that the messages were intended to raise awareness of the causes that were mentioned and to stimulate giving to those charities. Too bad Groupon didn’t mention any of those noble goals in the commercials themselves.

I haven’t conducted a scientific analysis, but in monitoring the mainstream media coverage as well as the chatter on Twitter and Facebook today, it appeared to me that commentary was running about 80% negative on the campaign. As of this writing, there are more than 300 comments on the blog entry CEO Andrew Mason posted just before the ads debuted, the vast majority of them critical.

Mason finally posted a response to the outpouring of commentary today. Rather than admitting that the campaign was a failure, he attempted to defend it. “When we think about commercials that offend us, we think of those that glorify antisocial behavior – like the scores of Super Bowl ads that are built around the crass objectification of women. Unlike those ads, no one walks away from our commercials taking the causes we highlighted less seriously.”

Actually, when I think about commercials that offend me, the image of Timothy Hutton using the suffering of the Tibetan people to sell direct marketing services will forever remain etched upon my mind. Andrew, you set a high-water mark for offensiveness. You’ve made the GoDaddy ads look like Dr. Seuss by comparison.

Mason goes on to explain why the ads are clever and innovative. Unfortunately, anyone knows that it’s pointless to explain a joke. If people don’t get the joke in the first place, then attempting to tell people why it’s funny just looks pathetic at best and arrogant at worst.

I don’t know who counsels Groupon about public relations. Its press releases cite Julie Mossler, who appears to be an employee, as the contact. This company clearly needs some help in crisis communications, though. Any experienced counsel would tell Groupon to apologize, make good with its critics and put this problem behind it as quickly as possible.

However, Groupon appears to be committed to moving ahead with this campaign. It’s tweaking the endings of the ads to make the tie-ins to charities clearer, and I suppose that helps a little. But it doesn’t change that fact that this campaign is tasteless, unfunny and now only borderline offensive.  It is vaguely reminiscent of the Pets.com sock-puppet ads of the late 90s, the difference being that the sock puppet was at least amusing. These ads aren’t, and Groupon would be well advised to run screaming from them as quickly as possible.

Here’s another thigh-slapper from the video series for your amusement. Deforestation is a great tie-in to product discounts.