So the guy behind those two SalesGenie.com Super Bowl ads is the chief executive of the company that owns SalesGenie, and not an outside ad agency. Vinod Gupta — who described himself as half-Indian and half-Jewish — apologized in a New York Times article and said he was going to stop running the panda ad. But he didn’t get what all the fuss was about.
“We never thought anyone would be offended,” said Mr. Gupta, who developed and wrote both commercials himself.
“The pandas are Chinese,” he said. “They don’t speak German.”
Still, “if I offended anybody,” Mr. Gupta said, “believe me, I apologize.”
Mr. Gupta said he planned to keep running the other Salesgenie commercial, featuring an animated salesman named Ramesh who speaks with an Indian or other South Asian accent.
The reason, Mr. Gupta said, was that “more people seem upset about the pandas than Ramesh.”
“People have been making fun of my accent for years,” said Mr. Gupta, who described himself in the interview as half-Indian and half-Jewish. “And I love it.”
