Remember this cringe-worthy Superbowl ad about the stereotypical desi salesman who is about to be fired by his cranky white boss? [Update - changed from the Panda ad to the Ramesh ad, thanks VV]
It was written by the CEO of InfoUSA himself, Vin Gupta. The ad was not just offensive, it was a total waste of money:
The panda ad ranked 45th out of 55 ads shown during the Super Bowl. The other Salesgenie ad, with a salesman who thinks he is going to get fired, ranked 50th. [Link]
Gupta doesn’t seem to mind spending money though, as long as it gets him visibility. Gupta is an FOB, a Friend of Bill that is (although he is also a DBD). Gupta is generous to Bill not just with his own personal money, but also with the company’s resources as well:
Gupta’s Clinton connection came into the spotlight last year, when angry shareholders of InfoUSA filed a lawsuit in a Delaware court; claiming that the CEO had wasted millions of dollars of the publicly-traded company to get into Clinton’s good books.
They seem to have good cause. The plaintiffs have alleged that Gupta misused the company jet to fly the Clintons to vacations. Gupta is believed to have paid Bill Clinton $2 million for vaguely-defined ‘consulting services’. In addition, he is alleged to have spent close to a million dollars to fly Bill Clinton around the world for his Presidential Foundation work; and to fly Hillary to campaign events. [Link]After the Clintons left the White House, Gupta hired Bill Clinton as a consultant. It’s one of two continuing business relationships he has had since leaving office, and it has been worth $3.3 million, in addition to the options on 100,000 shares of stock. [Link]
But here the story shifts, and becomes stranger.
The latest twist in the story involves Gupta getting something from the Clintons, for a fraction of its costs. The most important asset of a campaign is its lists of contributors. You normally guard these with your life. So why was the Clinton campaign renting these to Info USA, and for a fraction of their market value?
Political campaigns spend thousands, even millions of dollars to acquire good mailing lists. Last year, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton took the unusual step of renting out some of her lists. Reports from Clinton’s campaign show that on Dec. 3, it collected payment for renting out three mailing lists, the sale of which netted them $8,225.It was an unusual transaction, according to Roger Craver, a liberal guru of the political direct-mail industry. “As a general rule, a campaign will not let its donor list out into the markets until the campaign is over,” he said. “This is the mother’s milk of small-gift fundraising, and they use these lists frequently.”
According to one direct-mail professional, $800,000 would have seemed like a more plausible price for a quality list. [Link]
So what is going on here? Why is such a generous donor to Bill getting gifts, as it were, from Hillary?
It seems like obscure inside baseball, but it’s very strange behavior - no other campaign is lending out its lists, and here the Clinton campaign is not only lending out its list for nothing, but to somebody who is paying Bill millions of dollars. Was this a quid-pro-quo? Or just a sale of an unimportant subset of their main list as a test to gauge the valuation of their donor list?
