Filed under: Bad news, Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising

This post is part of our Ads Gone Bad series. Share your thoughts and memories of this ad in the comments, and be sure to check out our other posts on marketing gone wrong.

If Americans are sensitive about racial issues, it’s not without reason. Think about the Trail of Tears, or slavery, or the internment of the Japanese during World War II, and it’s clear that we’ve breached more than our fair share of ethical boundaries. But, judging by the reaction to a Salesgenie ad that aired during Super Bowl XLII in 2008, we’ve also come a long way.

If the upset victory pulled off by the New York Giants in that game was shocking, so was the approach taken by Salesgenie.com’s marketing masterminds. The commercial in question featured a pair of talking cartoon pandas, complete with Chinese accents — a married couple, to be exact, and the apparent proprietors of Ling Ling’s Bamboo Furniture Shack. (Click here to watch the ad.)

The storyline of the commercial is not too shocking: business is bad; nagging wife doesn’t want to move back to the zoo; husband turns to Salesgenie.com for free sales leads; now, business is great! In other words, it’s not nearly as appalling as some old, World War II-era Looney Tunes clips (don’t click here if you’re easily offended).

However, there was something distinctly off-putting about the Salesgenie pandas, with their broken English and their misspelled “Sofaz” sign. I remember seeing it myself and thinking, “Well, that’s bold.” It turns out the rest of the viewing public was equally unsettled, and the negative feedback was adequate to result in the ad being pulled from the airwaves.

That’s not the whole story, though. The commercial was penned by Vinod Gupta, the chairman and CEO of Salesgenie.com’s parent company, infoGROUP (NASDAQ: IUSA). Mr. Gupta, who claims both Indian and Jewish heritage, wrote another controversial ad starring an Indian-accented character named Ramesh. Both spots debuted during 2008’s large game, presumably to the same audience — but while the pandas were deemed too hot for TV, Ramesh’s spot was granted to run. Go figure!

I guess the differing fates of the Salesgenie.com ads provide a valuable lesson about the politics of race; that’s, you can go ahead and stereotype your own ethnic group any way you like, and no one will argue. Remember the episode of Seinfeld wherein Dr. Tim Whatley converts to Judaism “just for the jokes?” (Yes; everything I need to know, I learned from Larry David.)

Meanwhile, on the business end of things, 2008 marked the second consecutive year where Salesgenie.com debuted a Super Bowl commercial that was hammered by negative public feedback. (In 2007, viewers took offense to the shoddy production values of the spot, rather than any perceived slight to minority groups.) Coincidentally, both ads were authored by Mr. Gupta.

Since Eli Manning and the boys collected their rings, things have gone downhill for parent company IUSA. The shares tapped a multi-year low near $4 in mid-July, even though they’ve since pared some of their losses. Investors were no doubt cheered by the late-July announcement that Gupta was stripped of his chairman post after a special committee of the board uncovered excessive corporate expenditures. Perhaps the CEO was diverting company cash toward high-priced screenwriting workshops?

In any event, we can only hope that the new chairman of IUSA will have the common sense to prevent any more Gupta-penned ads from assaulting America’s sacred football-viewing time. And, while I’m pleased that our country finally has its first African-American presidential candidate, I made a disheartening realization in my research for this article. Before you declare the thorny issue of racism to be just another chapter in our history books, consider this: our most vocal national spokesmen against Asian-American discrimination are two stoners named Harold and Kumar.

Elizabeth Harrow is an analyst and financial writer in the research department at Schaeffer’s Investment Research. She’s featured in the video series Schaeffer’s Daily Q&A on SchaeffersResearch.com.

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Filed under: Consumer experience, Marketing and advertising

This post is part of our Ads Gone Bad series. Share your thoughts and memories of this ad in the comments, and be sure to check out our other posts on marketing gone wrong.

Mars Inc., has made not just one, but two ad campaigns for its popular Snickers bar seem to sneer at gays. Mars, one of the biggest privately held, family-owned companies, makes many of the world’s most popular candies: Snickers, M&Ms, Twix, Starburst (along with Uncle Ben’s Rice and pet food like Whiskas), but both of the ads gay rights groups found offensive were for the Snickers bar.

The first gay-themed Snickers ad made a massive splash in Super Bowl XLI in 2007. Two mechanics get so wrapped up in eating the opposite ends of Snickers bar that their lips touch, prompting them to decide to “do something manly” lest they accidentally catch gayness — so they pull their chest hair out.

The commercial not only offended gay rights groups, such as the Human Rights Campaign, but also was widely discussed and mocked as idiotic. Comedian Jon Stewart noted the on the internet alternative endings — in which the men pummel each other — were even worse. Mars didn’t apologize, but pulled the ad — while noting that it had been popular with the football audience.

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) and the Matthew Shepard Foundation found those endings even more offensive. “This campaign encourages the same type of hate that led to the death of my son Matthew. It essentially gives ‘permission’ to our society to verbally or physically harass individuals who are gay, lesbian or bisexual,” said Judy Shepard, the executive Director of the Matthew Shepard Foundation and the mother of Matthew Shepherd, who was targeted for being gay and tortured and left to die on a Wyoming fence in 1998.

The Human Rights Campaign says it began a “constructive dialog with Mars on workplace inclusion for GLBT employees” after the gay Superbowl ad. They seemed to think the company was making some progress. Then a new ad showed up in England in 2008 showing Mr. T shooting Snickers bars at an effeminate speed walker, calling him “a disgrace to the man race” and ending with the tag line “get some nuts.” The Human Rights Campaign stated they were surprised at the company’s regression, but applauded it for pulling the ad.

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Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Linux, E-mail, Productivity, Google, Freeware, How-Tos

A friend recently asked me how he could set his Gmail up so that he could email himself ideas, and have them be automatically filed away into a specific label instead of clogging up his inbox. Gmail has a function called Filters which is similar to rules in other email systems, and it is very powerful and well-suited to this task. If you would like to be able to email yourself information and have it automatically be stored away into a label and stay out of your inbox, follow these instructions.

So the first thing to keep in mind is that there are reasons where you might legitimately want to email yourself and have it show up in your inbox, for example you might Reply All to something and find that your email address was included as an addressee. You don’t want a thread like that one getting automatically moved into a folder, or you might miss it.

So the solution is to use a custom email address, which is easy. Gmail supports an email standard that allows you to add a plus symbol after your username, and anything you like after that. So an email sent to username+ideas@gmail.com will go right into your Gmail account the same way one sent to username@gmail.com will.

But here’s the cool thing: you can filter based on the actual incoming email address. Here’s how:

Continue reading How to organize your ideas in Gmail - Emailers Anonymous

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Filed under: Internet, Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Productivity, Mozilla, Freeware, Browser Tips

Love him or hate him, productivity blogger Merlin Mann has come up with a great way to help keep yourself on track. The idea is to avoid the seductions of the web by stopping a moment to make sure that you’re spending your time on what you really want to be spending it on.

In his blog post on the subject, Merlin describes opening folders full of bookmarks all in one go, which have the potential to suck up large amounts of time. He therefore created a page on his site that asks him “Is this what you want to be doing right now?”, and included it as the first bookmark in each of his folders of bookmarks.

While this is a great idea, if you don’t operate the same way, opening complete folders of bookmarks all at once, this probably won’t help you much. But what if you could set your browser to open this page by default each time you opened a blank new tab or new browser window?

With the NewTabURL extension for Firefox, you can do exactly that. Slick, and helpful.

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Filed under: News, E-mail, Productivity

As a refresher, snail mail is the paper mail that arrives to your actual street address or PO box. If you think of it as a chore to open and then recycle or shred all the paper on a daily basis, Earth Class Mail which David Pogue reported recently, might be an option to try.

For a fee, you can have your mail sent to a special PO box or pretentious street address and they’ll scan it for you. Now you don’t have to get your hands dirty or suffer paper cuts or fill the real recycling bin. An added bonus is the capability to be a poser while you read your mail on the internet in the obscurity of your real address, wherever that is - even if it’s a van down by the river.

Naturally, pricing for this service isn’t for those without a big, fat wallet. A pretentious street address costs more than the PO box, up to $24.95 per month more, if you pick the Park Avenue address. The street address fee is on top of the value plan pricing which is $9.95 per month for 35 pieces of mail and includes 50 scans. Plans go up from there.

When you receive mail, Earth Class Mail will send you an email saying “You’ve got mail.” Thankfully, this is something you read and don’t hear. The email has a scan of the outer envelope. You’ve several options at this point. You can send to trash, recycle, or shred. If you want to see the contents, you can request a scan of the innards which takes an additional day to process. The scan is emailed to you as a PDF. You can also have your mail forwarded to you as in physically, for additional money of course.

In the end, you still have to deal with your mail either online or in 3D. Earth Class Mail just doesn’t do everything. But it does give you an address you can be proud of.

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