Salesgenie.com president Vinod Gupta has apologized for two offensive SuperBowl ads featuring animated pandas that spoke with painfully stereotypical “Chinese” accents and an “animated salesman named Ramesh who speaks with an Indian or other South Asian accent.”:
“We never thought anyone would be offended,” said Mr. Gupta, who developed and wrote both commercials himself.“The pandas are Chinese,” he said. “They don’t speak German.”
Still, “if I offended anybody,” Mr. Gupta said, “believe me, I apologize.”
Mr. Gupta says his company will pull the panda ad.
An Ad With Talking Pandas, Maybe, but Not With Chinese Accents [New York Times]
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you think companies would grow up. These racial caricatures are pathetic. It wasn’t just the panda with a crappy chinese accent. I was more offended about the poor Indian guy on the first commercial.
It was obvious they were trying for a cheap laugh by making the accents so awful.
Seriously…It offensive. For everyone crying out PC this PC that…SCREW YOU, pal.
@m4ximusprim3: There’s an mature-rated cartoon called Squidbillies that’s about an inbred family of redneck squids that live in the North Georgia mountains. (I know, don’t ask.) The funniest thing about it to me is that the squids hate white people and refer to them as Chalkys.
Which I can’t help but find hilarious.
What about a commercial featuring an Asian person with a British accent and a white person with a Chinese accent. Are we offended? What about a Japanese person with a Chinese accent? How’s your mind, blown?
@nequam: i think that’s their idea.
I saw nothing wrong with those commercials.
People from India usually have large families. Mr. Gupta’s from India, so I’m sure he’d know this better than I. Heck, Apu from the Simpsons has 8 kids, and I don’t see anyone’s outrage there.
The pandas in the other commercial were Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling. The characters were modeled after the 2 Pandas the Chinese government sent to Nixon and were put in the Washington zoo.
I’m always surprised at how easily offended people are. Lighten up.
i saw this ad with someone from china. he was obviously upset, but i wasn’t in the mood to get into why he shouldn’t be upset. oh the PC police. you are alway on the ball!
When stuff like this happens I see more crying and whining about how everything is soooo PC than I do people actually being offended. Wahhhh, no one has the right to not be offended! Waaahhhhh, what about the good old days? *sniffle* Why is everyone so sensitive?! *sniffle*
This guy ain’t sorry in the least. There’s no such thing as bad publicity when you’re trying to get your name out there. Besides, you can always change your company’s name, and eventually everyone forgets about it.
Pretty soon we’ll all just have to be bland and dull so as to make sure we don’t offend anyone.
I think we chinese are offended because the Panda was potrayed as a lazy idiot. Chinese people are bright people dammmit.
Now if the Panda was a high rolling multibillionair that’s well endowed. Then no one would be offended.
I didn’t even consider the racism, I just thought the ads were bad, period.
@kashmirkong: “Heck, Apu from the Simpsons has 8 kids, and I don’t see anyone’s outrage there.”
If you followed The Simpsons you’d know that the reason Apu has 8 kids is that other characters put fertility drugs in his wife’s food
@theblackdog:
Well, when you overpay for the slot, and you’re running a fly-by-night operation like SalesGenie, you necessarily skimp on the production.
I agree with El_Guapo; this is a classic case of “no such thing as bad publicity.” The commercials could easily have been done with American voiceovers, but there would have been absolutely zero buzz. Throwing in comically stereotypical accents provided the buzz–he got a writeup in the New York Times! That’s gold, Jerry! Gold!
I’d like to pose the question: do you think that he was savvy in choosing Asian stereotypes, knowing that the outcry would be less damaging than, say, if it was Jewish/African-American/Hispanic? For some reason it seems that mocking Asians is received with less clamor. See Al D’Amato (“Rance Ito!”) didn’t receive nearly the bashing that Don Imus did.
I didn’t find these commercials offensive, I just found them to be stupid.
Someone has money to burn…or venture capital.
@Pithlit:
Up yours dude. It’s pretty offensive.
And your immaturity is quite telling.
Since when are accents offensive?
@ironchef: You seem to have completely missed Pithlit’s point.
Gupta is a douchebag, self-dealer and lousy manager.
@Pithlit: The issue is not whether people have a right not to be offended. The issue is that television has a responsibility to present content that is in the public interest.
Offensive content, be it offensively racist or offensively stupid, should not be aired. In my opinion, racial stereotypes are always offensively stupid.
I know it’s fashionable to bemoan political correctness run rampant, but there is certainly justification to being sensitive to things like this. It’s just a matter of where you draw the line.
Of course it’s sensible that a Scottish Terrier would have a Scottish accent. However, it’s disingenuous to compare that to a negatively stereotypical characterization of an entire race, e.g. an African American portrayed in a minstrel show-esque manner. The problem here is that the commercial was closer to the latter example than the former.
@Git Em SteveDave: Yep, smart pandas speak Midwestern-accented English.
@Pithlit: Yeah, I love the people who whine about the PC Police too. And you know the people who are offended are mostly laying low because they don’t want to be lectured by a bunch of self-righteous twits about how they just need to get over that whole racism thing.
@noquarter: BROADCAST television using the public airwaves has the responsibility you assert. This would, of course, include the coverage of the Super Bowl and the ads displayed during its broadcast.
But for non-broadcast cable or TV-over-Internet stuff? That’s a different matter, wouldn’t you agree?
And who determines what content is “offensive?”
I’m not trying to be a jerk, I’m just trying to illustrate the point about why these issues are always difficult.
I wonder if there are any other ads that SalesGenie decided NOT to run because someone from outside had a look at them and responded by asking “are you f*&#ing kidding?”…
@nequam:
RE: Esurance chick:
Rule 34 of the internets applies.
Seriously, take a look…
Is it me, or did the boss in the “Ramesh, if you don’t blah blah blah YOU’RE OUTTA HERE” sound just a WEE bit like Spaceley Sprockets saying
“Jetson, if you don’t blah blah blah, YOU’RE FIRED!”
Just me, eh?
A few things.
First, when you advertise on the public airwaves, then you open yourself up to any amount of bitching. It’s not like someone eavesdropped on Mr. Gupta in his living room.
Second, if he has the freedom to spew crap to try and make a buck, then everyone here has EVERY right to complain about it.
Third, none of this “PC police” crap. It’s a straw man. There’s a difference between expressing an opinion and “policing” something. Last I read, no one in this thread suggested banning the ad.
Fourth, as a white male, I didn’t feel I knew enough to judge totally, but my first impression was that it was racist. So, I asked some Chinese American friends. The response? “Totally racist. Mickey-Rooney-in-Breakfast-at-Tiffany’s racist.” And seeing how I can’t judge Chinese accents as well as they can, I believe them.
@noquarter: I find just about everything on the lifetime channel offensive. I guess that means we shouldn’t air that stuff either.
I don’t think we should censure everything just “in case” it might offend someone. People need to get a little thicker skin.
A few months ago I wrote a program to scrape salesgenie.com. I don’t feel so bad writing that app now…
@darkjedi26: You seem to have missed the point.
@Flynn: So a good chinese accent isn’t racist, but a poorly done one is?
I’m not saying you’re wrong (cause im white and not educated in chinese as well), but just trying to parse the comment.
Im an Asian-American. I dont get offended easily. However, I was slightly offended by the Salesgenie.com commercial. Im not offended to the point that Im going to raise hell.
If this commercial portrayed animals in the “black stereotype,” all hell would be raised. American culture is more forgiving over stereotyping Asians, like in Family Guy. From what Ive seen, Seth McFarlane must dislike Asians. Love Family Guy though!
I noted the same racism in the commercial when I saw it during the super bowl. Giving the animals accents does not make me cringe. Giving the two dumb pandas thick accents and giving the smart “sales” panda a more standard dialect comes off as pretty offensive.
@iMike: oh I see you’ve dealt with him too
@ekthesy: InfoUsa is not fly by night at all they have 3,000 employees and did close to $500 mil in sales in 2006..
@VeritasNoir: Understood, but how is that different from a commercial with two dumb crocodiles with backwoods arkansas accents and a smart sales crocodile with a neutral “newscaster” accent. I wouldn’t find that at all insulting. Some humans are smarter than others and it’s good advertising to show the smart one using your product.
Now, if there were two stupid chinese pandas and a smart japanese man somehow taking advantage of them, I’d be offended, because you’re portraying one race as superior. Thats all I’m saying.
Um his last name is Gupta? Really? Well that changes things… I think.
If you’re spending that kind of money for Superbowl ads, you would think they would be fairly certain of the market’s reaction. Maybe run it by a focus group ahead of time?
It doesn’t help any that the commercial just plain sucks. I usually don’t succumb to the “PC” thing, but that was pretty tacky IMHO.
I thought this right away. I was surprised when the people I with didn’t roll their eyes but rather said how many awful animated ads there are. Ugh.
It was a stupid ad but people were offended? Geez! So many PC douche bags out there. Why do people try to get offended by these things?
If all my sales calls and customer service experience weren’t with someone from India that is impossible to understand I would be offended. So honestly, I can relate with having an Indian sales person in this commercial.
@rdldr1: You mean like the black weatherman on Family Guy?
This is a great example of why it’s important for companies to preview these sorts of ads to a focus group in order to get a better idea of what the potential responses will be. While it might have seemed like a good idea at the time to one or two people within the company, clearly these commercials didn’t end up being as well liked as the company initially thought they would be. It’s surprising, given the cost to air these ads, that this wasn’t thought through a little bit more thoroughly.
This entire things seems blown out of hand. I watched the commercial, and found it only natural for a CHINESE PANDA to speak witha CHINESE ACCENT. It is like having a jackie chan movie, where he speaks with the voices switched (lets say Chris rock’s voice is Jackie Chan, and vice versa), it would just look weird and not be the same.
As a Chinese person (though I have no accent, having grown up in America), I can safely say no one I know has that kind of accent. My parents have accents, but nothing like the commercial. To me it’s more of an accent that other people made up. I’m sure there are some people that speak like that, but those are few and far between and I’ve never met one before. Unless you count that American guy who spoke that way as a form of satyr.
The problem I have with the commercial (I don’t really mind, but whatever) is that it felt like it was portraying the characters as stupid. It was an extremely crude commercial that lacked social grace and basic etiquette. Frankly, I’m surprised that it was even allowed to air. If I owned the network that aired commercials, I wouldn’t want something like that fouling up my shows.
This wasn’t just an innocuous Chinese accent; it was the offensive, stereotypical Charlie Chan accent that rightfully disappeared from our landscape years ago. Nobody actually speaks like that. It would be akin to using a shufflin’ black man saying “Sho ’nuff, ma’am,” with his head hung low.
The objections are anything but politically correct. I was shocked when I saw the ad during the game.
@TinkishDelight: This quote also changes things:
I think the issue here has something to do with “to assimilate or not to assimilate”. Gupta seems to have the position that you can be proud of what some assimilated immigrants might call a FOB accent.
Categorizing accents in the “Is it offensive to imitate?” and “If you have <insert accent here> in America, should you lose it or enhance it?” matrices gets ridiculously complicated really fast. Try this yourself, I gave up after 10 accents or so.
Well I hope he doesnt get offended when I write my cartoons about taxi drivers with Indian accents…
you white americans are so stupid. that is why we chinese are going to bury you and you will all work for us some day. you watch your porn, watch your tv, don’t save money, make more lawyers than engineers and drive around in big cars all day with stupid children that can’t find most countries on a map or speak a second language. you fight in iraq while we drill oil in sudan. you are so stupid and now that we can buy your country because your money is worthless, you will soon be the slaves to us which is what you lazy people deserve.
Really? This is a pretty pressing issue? This is something that the New York Times is using print space for?
You’re not children. If you didn’t like his commercial, dont buy whatever it is he is selling and stop crying about it in the pages of the New York Times.
@Git Em SteveDave: I don’t think so. Let’s do a Google search comparison:
german accent racist -salesgenie
versus
chinese accent racist -salesgenie
Is that proof that Germans are not offended? No. But I don’t think anyone would have complained, even if David Hasselhoff was in it.
Another game to play is “What’s most offensive about Saturday Night Live’s Japanese Game Show?” Chris Farley’s racist impersonation of a boisterous American tourist is totally offensive to me.
I didn’t find these offensive. I was kind of pleased to see an Indian character in the first commercial, and Chinese characters in the second. The only thing that might be seen as offensive is the number of the Indian man’s children. Were they just not acting WASPy enough? Were people who are not white offended by these?