Gung Hey Fat Choy! Salesgenie.com is celebrating Chinese Lunar New Year by pulling its Super Bowl ad, featuring pandas speaking in exaggerated Chinese accents, because it turns out that people get offended by that sort of thing.
Exaggerated Indian accents, though? Not so much. The company has no plans to retract its other newly-debuted ad, featuring a comically-accented sales rep of apparent subcontinental extraction. The company’s chairman, Vinod Gupta, says Salesgenie didn’t receive as many complaints about that ad.
Gupta also, apparently by way of justification, told the New York Times that he himself is half-Indian, half-Jewish. Well, at least we know what Salesgenie’s next Super Bowl ad will be: “Oy gevalt! Such tsuris these lousy sales leads are giving me!” I’m Jewish, so we’re cool with that, right?