SalesGenie Pandas Are Back, Sans Accents

Remember Ling Ling and Ching Ching, the cartoon pandas with the Chinese accents in SalesGenie's much-reviled Super Bowl commercial? Well, they're back -- minus the accents.

Only a few days after its debut, SalesGenie pulled the ad from circulation, with CEO Vinod Gupta apologizing to those who took offense at its crude use of Chinese sterotypes.

But in the past month, the company, which markets lists of leads to sales professionals, has begun running a new version of the spot in which the pandas speak in Mandarin, with English subtitles. (The screengrab above is from CNBC.)

"Just a few people were unhappy about the Chinese accents -- they thought maybe it was an insult to the Chinese community," says Gupta, who writes the ads himself and takes perverse pride in their awfulness. "So we changed it into Mandarin."

The new version, which is airing on a range of cable news and sports channels, is, if anything, more effective, he says. "It gets attention when you have a broadcast in English, and all the of the sudden they hear Mandarin language."

Thanks to eagle-eyed reader Mike for spotting the new version and alerting me to it.

Here's the old version: