Those of you who watched the Super Bowl last week may remember two ads by salesgenie.com1. The first features Ramesh, an Indian salesman with 7 kids; the second features a family of pandas with Chinese accents. Both have ludicrous plotlines2.
Both of these ads clearly have racial (although not necessarily racist) undertones, and even though neither one offended me in the slightest, it really surprised me that someone would produce both ads to be run in the single-largest video ad market in the US. I'm sure lots of people got pissed at these ads.
But then again, I suppose you always run that risk when you produce an ad—and admittedly, all of the discussion around this means that salesgenie.com gets a taste of Janet Jackson's fame from a few years back.
Anyway, I bring this up because the head smarmster1 CEO of salesgenie has apologized to anyone who was offended by his ad. He also delivers a lot of common sense ("The pandas are Chinese. They don't speak German") which is pretty atypical of your average CEO3.
1 I'm intentionally not linking this due to overall smarminess by this company. I've never liked unsolicited sales—especially in this age of easy net search.
2 Like Logjammin'?
3 By now, you're probably wondering which point I'm making. Is this guy a skeezball? Or does he tell it like it is? Are Americans overly sensitive? Have ads become irritatingly benign? It's all of the above, really.
I don't even remember those commercials from the Superbowl. I googled salesgenie.com because I really don't know what they provide...and still really don't. Perhaps said smarmster is relying on the philosophy that, "there is no such thing as bad publicity." Good or bad, people are still going to visit the website now out of curiosity. I suspect what salesgenie is expecting is the large number of people that visit the site, a small number will actually use their services.
I guess score one for salesgenie.com?
Yeah, no press is bad press.
Salesgenie hocks lists of consumers and business for direct marketing and market research. Wikipedia has some info on InfoUSA, Salesgenie's parent company.