For years, marketers wondered how their products or services would play in Peoria. Now, is Portland becoming that marketing hotspot for the digital generation? Google thinks so, choosing the Rose City for the roll out of its new Google Offers daily deal service.

“There’s no end to the city’s great restaurants, coffee shops, hot spots and places to explore,” Google wrote in a blog post announcing the new service. “That’s why, when we started planning the Google Offers beta, we knew Portland was the ideal place to get it all kicked off.”

Maybe Google was simply inspired by this episode of Portlandia.

With a concentration of local businesses and deep broadband penetration, Google believes that Portland is the best spot to test its new offering as it attempts to gain a foothold against Groupon in the expanding daily deal arena. Google tried buy Groupon last year, but its failed bid led to the search giant starting its own rival service.

Technology Loop on Portlandia

Google Offers is starting today with a deal at Floyd’s Coffee Shop. Buyers of the discount receive $10 worth of coffee — (or a “killer breakfast burrito”) — for just $3. Mike Rogoway at The Oregonian interviews Floyd’s owner Jack Inglis who wonders how they are going to handle the expected “onslaught.” Other merchants signed up in Portland include Powell’s Books, Le Bistro Montage and Ground Kontrol Classic Arcade.

This isn’t the first time that Google has chosen Portland for a new service. As Rogoway notes, the company introduced Hotpot, a competitor to Yelp and CitySearch, in Portland last December.

We’d normally take offense at all of the attention that Portland is getting from Google, but we’ll take the more than 800 engineers that the search giant employs in the Seattle area instead. (We also plan to win our ongoing wager with Portland’s Rick Turoczy for the July 10th Sounders-Timbers match).

Google Offers plans to expand to New York and San Francisco later this summer. No word on when it will arrive in Seattle.

Here’s a video of Google introducing Google Offers at the D9 conference yesterday, with the Offers component starting in minute seven.


Related: Tippr buys DealPop social buying site from WhitePages

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