hardboiled

questionable goals

by omar narvaez

For many, the Super Bowl is an annual event that invokes many images: beer, chips, live musical performances, and mass exodus from churches across the nation. But for others, the Super Bowl plays a very important role as a symbol of mass media in today’s society. Advertisements played during the Super Bowl sometimes gain more attention than the game itself. They can be everything from exuberantly expensive, to silly, to downright thought-provoking.

 A range of companies vie for airtime during the Super Bowl as it is the most widely watched broadcast every year, paying millions of dollars to screen a thirty second commercial. Those that acquire a spot attempt to make the most of it; however, one company, Salesgenie, not only made the worst of its advertisement time during the biggest sports event of the year, but it managed to offend Asian Americans in the process.

 The two ads that ran during the game had very basic premises. A struggling salesman struggles to keep up with the pressures placed on him by either his immediate superior or the customer. Facing imminent failure, the salesman turns to Salesgenie.com in order to find a way to increase their sales. As is the case with most advertisements, this basic premise attempts to capture the audience’s attention by presenting itself using several gimmicks. The first of which is that the ads are animated. The cartoon characters attempt to make a commercial about marketing solutions more interesting than it sounds. The reflexivity and the overused gimmick of cartoon characters alone is enough to make these poorly written and produced commercials, but the Salesgenie ads take it one step further and uses stereotypical Indian American and Chinese American characters to sell their product.

 One ad features the Indian American salesman “Ramesh” who is pressured by his boss to double his sales. Ramesh is the father of seven children and can’t afford to lose his job. Calling upon the powers of Salesgenie, he successfully doubles his sales and is awarded with an Academy Awards-like ceremony with his entire family on stage. The other ad features “Ling Ling’s Bamboo Furniture Shack” and its declining sales due to lack of customers. As if the name of the shop wasn’t bad enough, Ling Ling is a cartoon panda with a thick, stereotypical, supposedly Chinese accent – an accent that fell out of style when ignorance became less commonplace and is usually seen today in bad comedy shows. The rest of the ad follows the formula of the Ramesh ad, with Ling Ling calling upon Salesgenie to help turn his struggling bamboo furniture business into an Ikea-like megastore.

 Salesgenie is owned by infoUSA, a provider of business information and marketing solutions. The Salesgenie ads featured in this year’s Super Bowl offered “100 free sales leads for every sales rep in your company.” With over four million customers worldwide and revenue of $700 million, infoUSA can afford to have a TV spot during the Super Bowl; however, the recent controversy over the racially insensitive ads that Salesgenie used this year puts into question the legitimacy of the process used to determine who will ultimately get their ad broadcast. Officials from Salesgenie commented that they were aiming to create the worst Super Bowl ad ever. The chairman and CEO of infoUSA, and the writer of both of the commercials is Vinod Gupta, an Asian American himself. With both of these facts in mind, the question remains: does the amount of money a company has, the mindset they have in producing a commercial, and the heritage of their writer legitimize the production and broadcast of stereotypical and racist media? That last question in particular is one that has come up various times in all sorts of media. Why does an Asian American writer or a writer from any background for that matter, feel that they have the right to perpetuate stereotypes or create racist media as long as it’s their own culture they’re ridiculing? One has to try and figure out where Gupta was coming from when he thought up of these commercials. Perhaps, when he thought he would make the worst commercial possible, he drew from his own background as an Asian American man and thought of the commercial he would think was the worst had he seen it aired on television. As a company that deals with marketing solutions, Gupta was probably thinking with two mindsets – his mindset as an Asian American and his mindset as a businessman. The advertisement delivers – it is the worst they could possibly come up with – but at what cost? Gupta sacrificed his integrity as an Asian American public figure and chairman of a multimillion-dollar company in order to generate publicity. Asian Americans in these types of positions have a lot of responsibility, not only to their company, but also to who they are and where they come from. Gupta didn’t live up to that responsibility and as a result many people were offended by an ad that didn’t have to be offensive.

 Putting the motives, origins, and insensitivity aside, the commercials do end up being poorly made, poorly animated, non-thought provoking, 30-second flops. The final product not only offends, but is also a waste of time and money. The Super Bowl is a grand event that relies on money from advertising. Over the years it has grown to the point where some people only watch the Super Bowl for the ads. As a result, companies have ended up spending more time and energy in creating great advertisements both to sell their products and to entertain. Ironically, though the Salesgenie ads did neither, the stir generated by the nature of the TV spots has gotten people to start talking. While we may remember Salesgenie.com and infoUSA for giving us a poorly made, racist Super Bowl ad, the sad part is that we end up remembering the company at all, which, in the end, was probably their ultimate goal.