Salesgenie.com advertisements rub APA community in the wrong way

[caption id=”attachment_227" align=”alignleft” width=”300" caption=”One of Salesgenie.com’s Super Bowl ads, featuring a panda with a Chinese accent as an owner of a bamboo furniture business, ignited controversy among the Asian American community, prompting the business consulting company to pull the ad. Photo courtesy of YouTube.com.”]

[/caption]During this year’s Super Bowl, advertisements for a business consulting Web site touched on a number of ethnic stereotypes, shocking and offending many and eventually prompting the company to withdraw one.

Two ads for Salesgenie.com, a division of entrepreneur Vinod Gupta’s infoUSA, caused the greatest amount of backlash among the Asian American community by using stereotypes of Chinese and South Asians to evoke humor.

The pulled ad featured two pandas who, in thick Chinese accents, panicked over the imminent failure of their bamboo furniture business. They consult the Salesgenie.com genie, a genie-like panda who speaks without an accent and reminds them to stop eating the bamboo furniture.

“We should ask ourselves why Asian characters almost automatically have to speak with accents, when of course in reality many do not,” said Phil Lee, a representative from the Media Action Network for Asian Americans.

When asked if he thought the advertisements were racist, Lee said, “There is nothing inherently racist about using accents…we don’t want to reward the company with more coverage than it has already received.”

Senior marketing major Christina Kim, however, finds the ad very racist.

“One would think that, as a country, we could get past the type of humor that apes something with the slightest difference for amusement,” Kim said.

It seemed as if the company had made a big blunder.

However, according to Gupta, the ads were intended to have this kind of negative effect.

The Salesgenie ads were “one of the few to feature a call-to-action, driving more than 25,000 people to the Salesgenie.com Web site,” Gupta, who is Indian, told the New York Times. “If it positively impacts business like it did last year, we’d be thrilled to be the worst again.”

In addition to the response on television, the ads posted by Salesgenie.com on YouTube and similar sites have elicited barrages of a variety of comments, many decrying the ads as racist, but a good number of viewers who supported Salesgenie.com’s venture.

The other Salesgenie.com ad that sparked controversy depicts a man of South Asian descent named Ramesh slaving away in front of a computer. While he is working, his short, Caucasian boss bursts into the office, threatening to fire him.

Ramesh, in a thick accent, protests, “But Hank, I have seven kids!” to nothing but a door slammed in his face by the boss. The commercial later depicts Ramesh (with the help of Salesgenie.com) winning an award, flanked by his wife and seven children.

“This ad not only sets up this immigrant worker as a lowly sales rep, but also shows that he’s supporting a wife and seven children,” said junior computer science major Rayhan Hasan after watching this particular Salesgenie.com commercial. “These are all stereotypes associated with immigrant workers from South Asia.”

Hasan made the distinction between representation and exploitation of diversity in advertising.

“This is not a case of real diversity in advertising.” Hasan said. “Ramesh is brown because it gives SalesGenie.com something to build their advertisement around. As a Bangladeshi-American, I find this advertisement insulting.”