Last year’s Salesgenie.com commercial was widely panned by ad critics as the worst, and Vinod Gupta, the company’s founder and chairman, said he was hoping to capture that crown a second straight year.

The only crown he captures with this Super Bowl ad is most offensive to a country of more than 1 billion people.

The company specializing in hooking salespeople up with leads went the animated route this year, introducing Hank Bullymonger, vice president of sales of the Acme Widget Co.

He grunts down the hallway and barges into an office to berate an Indian salesman named Ramesh.

“Ramesh. You’re my worst salesman. If you don’t double your sales, you’re out of here.”

“But Hank, I have seven kids.”

What? Are you kidding? You wait for the year’s largest television audience and then throw in an ethnic stereotype that does nothing to enhance the commercial’s content? Yes Gupta, who again wrote Salesgenie.com’s ads this year, was born in India, but would anyone watching this ad know that and does that make it right?

And Fox - which nixed 11 GoDaddy.com ads before letting their lone spot stand - was fine with this?

To continue with the ad, the boss yells “Not my problem,” as he slams the door.

Ramesh then types “How can i double my sales” into a Google-like search engine called Genie and up pops SalesGenie.com and its offer for 100 free sales leads. We then see Ramesh accepting the salesman of the year award at a star-studden ceremony.

Whatever.




This entry was posted on Sunday, February 3rd, 2008 at 5:52 pm and is filed under Super Bowl ads, TV Ads. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.