SalesGenie's Tasteless, 'Racist' Super Bowl Ad

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Mixed Media

by Jeff Bercovici

Main

Super Bowl Ads: The Six Best Worst Super Bowl Ads: The Runners-Up

Feb 4 2008 9:58AM EST

I'll be taking a fuller look later at the worst of this year's Super Bowl ads, but there's one that deserves a dishonorable mention of its own: SalesGenie's idiotic "Panda" spot, starring two annoying pandas with stereotyped Chinese accents.

Don't doubt for a second that SalesGenie is going to face protests over this. I just talked to a spokesman for OCA, an Asian-Pacific Americans advocacy group. "We found it really racist," he says. "We'll be discussing how to respond once we have everybody in the office, but some of our members have already been contacting us. It was really offensive."

And, as Jason Calcanis notes, SalesGenie's other spot, featuring an Indian-American man with seven children, wasn't much better.

Watch it for yourself.

By the way, SalesGenie CEO Vin Gupta writes the company's ads himself, and claims to take pride in making them as bad as possible. I guess by writing about them, I'm vindicating his "strategy." Sigh.

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