The ad is a success; it got people talking about it. It is cartoonish, cute.

Alex, do those Chinese people have an accent? The point is do they make the conection between them and the pandas.

Me and my white friend were watching it at a house with a bunch of Chinese people. Talk about awkward...

"Yo quiero Taco Bell"

"Always after me Lucky Charms"

Ethnic characters are often used to sell crappy products. Sometimes, they are offensive, sometimes they are not. Does anybody remember The Frito Bandito?



Geico pokes fun of this concept by offending cavemen.

It's obvious Mr. Gupta succeeded in getting the attention he craves.

Let's ignore this and maybe it will go away.

Pandas are indigenous to China, so if by some miracle they were able to speak, opened their own business in China, and then learned English, it would be safe to assume they would speak with a Chinese accent. Pandas are at an advantage in China, as they are exempt from the government's "one child" policy. They have also avoided joining Falun Gong, also a smart move.

Asians may talk funny but at least they're not lowlife leeches among our society.

let them cry hughgass, you just look like a douche and a bigger crybaby for whining about it.

didn't realize how thin yellow skin is. THE BIGGEST crybabies.

shiite, sorry bout the multiple posts. server errors...

I'd love to see the close ratio on those 100 free sales leads you receive. "Chumming" is right.

overall i think we all need to lighten up and stop being so sensitive.

but i would like to point out that some accents are perceived as a plus, other accents are perceived as otherwise.

for instance: anytime a brit friend of mine opens her mouth at a meeting, it's automatically assumed that she knows what she's talking about. positive assumptions are ascribed to her because of her accent.

at the same meeting if an asian guy contributes a valid point, but packaged in a chinese accent, the same assumptions are not granted. fact is, we assume someone thinks the way they speak.

in a social capital context, british, french, italian, latin accents are commonly noted as being desirable, even sexy; so anyone or any panda portrayed with a western accent is usually a good thing. because of fundamental linguistic/tonal differences between east asian languages and western languages, eastern inflected accents, to the western listener, often come across odd if not flat out undesirable --- not flattering for the speaker.

finally, i also noticed in the commercial, the male panda has the heavier accent.

that said, we shouldn't be so sensitive. if there's a stereotype asians need/want to counter, rather than complaining, they should just get out there and be that counter-stereotype.

asian guy, home w/ da flu

don't asian people remind you of the R0bear Berbils on thundercats? It's like they are these little android bear robots that everyone likes to pick on cause they are an insular society that likes to produce goods and just live without encroaching on others.

If Glengarry Glen Ross is even vaguely representative of sales douchebags, I think the ads accomplished exactly what they likely intended: free publicity for a business model that attracts money-hungry sharks who probably give the least amount of shit about political correctness. I think the technical term is: "chumming."

Lesson: short your salesgenie.com stock.

Would any business owner in his/her right mind use this service to generate "leads"?

Shouldn't the genie panda have had a Middle Eastern accent?

Well, now I know why noone at the ad agency or salesgenie said anything about these spots as they were being produced: the CEO wrote them.

I was more offended at the poor production quality.

It's amusing that a South Indian wrote the commercial that he should concievably be offended at. I guess he knows alot of fellow Indians toiling for whitey and with gaggles of kids.

I love how the CEO wrote the commercials himself. HEY, GENIUS, HIRE SOMEONE!

You people probably don't like Britney's Southern English accent either.

cucarachita: you may have been joking but Shrek has more of a scottish accent than english

Ha, the funny thing here is that the very badness of the commercial, and its offensiveness is what got people to notice it -- and got all these people on Gothamist to comment on it. The How the World Works column on Salon talks about how this was the intent of the CEO who wrote the commercial -- to make it bad enough and offensive enough to get people to notice it.

This is an old advertising technique really -- everyone always hated "ring around the collar", but it played for years because it worked. But this is a really, really high profile spot for intentionally annoying advertising.

Kind of interesting, if also soul-less.