Ads Gone Bad: Pandas aren't cute when they're racist, Salesgenie

Posted Sep 5th 2008 12:00PM by Elizabeth Harrow
Filed under: Bad News, Consumer Experience, Marketing and Advertising

This post is part of our Ads Gone Bad series. Share your thoughts and memories of this ad in the comments, and be sure to check out our other posts on marketing gone wrong.

If Americans are sensitive about racial issues, it's not without reason. Consider the Trail of Tears, or slavery, or the internment of the Japanese during World War II, and it's clear that we've breached more than our fair share of ethical boundaries. But, judging by the reaction to a Salesgenie ad that aired during Super Bowl XLII in 2008, we've also come a long way.

If the upset victory pulled off by the New York Giants in that game was shocking, so was the approach taken by Salesgenie.com's marketing masterminds. The commercial in question featured a pair of talking cartoon pandas, complete with Chinese accents -- a married couple, to be exact, and the apparent proprietors of Ling Ling's Bamboo Furniture Shack. (Click here to watch the ad.)

The storyline of the commercial is not too shocking: business is bad; nagging wife doesn't want to move back to the zoo; husband turns to Salesgenie.com for free sales leads; now, business is great! In other words, it's not nearly as appalling as some old, World War II-era Looney Tunes clips (don't click here if you're easily offended).

However, there was something distinctly off-putting about the Salesgenie pandas, with their broken English and their misspelled "Sofaz" sign. I remember seeing it myself and thinking, "Well, that's bold." It turns out the rest of the viewing public was equally unsettled, and the negative feedback was sufficient to result in the ad being pulled from the airwaves.

That's not the whole story, though. The commercial was penned by Vinod Gupta, the chairman and CEO of Salesgenie.com's parent company, infoGROUP (NASDAQ: IUSA). Mr. Gupta, who claims both Indian and Jewish heritage, wrote another controversial ad starring an Indian-accented character named Ramesh. Both spots debuted during 2008's big game, presumably to the same audience -- but while the pandas were deemed too hot for TV, Ramesh's spot was allowed to run. Go figure!

I guess the differing fates of the Salesgenie.com ads provide a valuable lesson about the politics of race; that is, you can go ahead and stereotype your own ethnic group any way you like, and no one will argue. Remember the episode of Seinfeld wherein Dr. Tim Whatley converts to Judaism "just for the jokes?" (Yes; everything I need to know, I learned from Larry David.)

Meanwhile, on the business end of things, 2008 marked the second consecutive year where Salesgenie.com debuted a Super Bowl commercial that was hammered by negative public feedback. (In 2007, viewers took offense to the shoddy production values of the spot, rather than any perceived slight to minority groups.) Coincidentally, both ads were authored by Mr. Gupta.

Since Eli Manning and the boys collected their rings, things have gone downhill for parent company IUSA. The shares tapped a multi-year low near $4 in mid-July, although they've since pared some of their losses. Investors were no doubt cheered by the late-July announcement that Gupta was stripped of his chairman post after a special committee of the board uncovered excessive corporate expenditures. Perhaps the CEO was diverting company cash toward pricey screenwriting workshops?

In any event, we can only hope that the new chairman of IUSA will have the common sense to prevent any more Gupta-penned ads from assaulting America's sacred football-viewing time. And, while I'm pleased that our country finally has its first African-American presidential candidate, I made a disheartening realization in my research for this article. Before you declare the thorny issue of racism to be just another chapter in our history books, consider this: our most vocal national spokesmen against Asian-American discrimination are two stoners named Harold and Kumar.

Elizabeth Harrow is an analyst and financial writer in the research department at Schaeffer's Investment Research. She is featured in the video series Schaeffer's Daily Q&A on SchaeffersResearch.com.

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Tags: Ads Gone Bad, commercial, infoGROUP, IUSA, pandas, racist, Super Bowl, SuperBowl, vinod gupta, VinodGupta