Tuesday, February 05, 2008

SalesGenie

I'm sure some we're calling it the 'Best Super Bowl Ever' but the ads from SalesGenie had to be two of the worst ever. The premise of each featured some ailing salespeople looking for ways to boost their performance. Also, each featured very heavy ethnic stereotypes. The first to air featured a South Asian salesman who when yelled at about his low numbers relies to his boss "but, boss, I have 7 kids." The second was more explicit, featuring a family of panda bears with Asian-American accents. They ran a bamboo furniture store. It seems that a commercial like this takes very little thought but really to create something like this takes a bit of time to come up with. To make so many stereotypes explicit in thirty seconds takes some effort. Below (for the time being) is the ad.


How does this happen? How does something like this, some company like this, get in front of the Super Bowl audience? I think SalesGenie blew their budget on ad time and had nothing left with which to develop a creative, yet sensitive, ad. Also, they opted to go with cartoon format, which I think says they lacked budget for actors, HD filming equipment, script, and maybe even a product to sell. Instead it appears that their peddling our names, addresses, and telephone numbers, perhaps obtained from our grocery store clubs, to marketers. The commercial was unsettling all around, but here I am still talking about it.

Super Bowl Ads
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2 comments:

ben said...

that ad is total ass. reason number 385293641924 why i'm not upset that i didn't watch the superbowl

vargo said...

Coincidentally 385,293,641,924 is exactly how much that ad cost.