I like the discover card commercials where nice, upstanding white folks call customer service for their other (obviously inferior) credit card to cash in rewards points or frequent flyer miles. Sure enough though, they’re greeted by a Russian fellow named Peggy who’s conducting call center business in a fishing shack or sweatshop. He proceeds to give incredibly poor service which results in the commercial ending with the customer getting frustrated and switching to discover.
What I find funny about these commercials is the avoidance of using Indian or middle eastern characters. I figure the reasoning behind this is either….
A. Fear of being labeled racists or anti-Muslim. Although we all KNOW most of our calls are routed to India, we can’t portray that on television without being labeled racially insensitive.
B. They use middle eastern folks with americanized bullshit names themselves and don’t want to be called hypocrites for chastising the practice (even though the commercial implies when you call them, you’ll get a hot blonde in a polo shirt).
Or C. There really is a Russian call center somewhere that they’re targeting.
Either way, it’s a clever attempt at relating to us the frustrations of not understanding accents over the phone and poor, uninformed people from other countries reading scripted answers when we’re already frustrated with the situation that prompted us to make the call in the first place. The only problem is: they pussed out and went with a safer country of origin. I bet they had meetings about it.
Where’s a foreign country that has accents but they’re still white?
Germany? Too scary.
Belgium? Not scary enough.
Russia? PERFECT!
I’d be more inclined to switch to a company that didn’t veil their bullshit commercial in clever comedic quips and just said “you’ll talk to someone from america when you call us and they actually can help you.” 22 syllables. 10 seconds at most. Pay Christian Slater to read the sentence. Put up the logo….fade to black. I’m sold.
