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The sponsor of two commercials during Super Bowl XLII for Salesgenie.com, which drew complaints from viewers because of the characters’ ethnic accents, says he is sorry and promises to stop running one of them.

Vinod Gupta, the chairman and chief executive of InfoUSA in Omaha, the parent of Salesgenie.com, said in a telephone interview that a commercial featuring two animated pandas speaking with what were intended as Chinese accents would be withdrawn.

“We never thought anyone would be offended,” said Gupta, who developed and wrote both commercials himself. “The pandas are Chinese,” he said. “They don’t speak German.” Still, “if I offended anybody,” Gupta said, “believe me, I apologise.”

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, he said, was that “more people seem upset about the pandas than Ramesh.”

“People have been making fun of my accent for years,” said Gupta, who described himself in the interview as half-Indian and half-Jewish. “And I love it.”

In the salesman spot, the sales leads that Ramesh finds on Salesgenie help him satisfy his demanding boss at Acme Widgets and win a sales contest. The spot appeared in the first quarter of the game Sunday. In the pandas spot, the Salesgenie leads help the animals keep open their store, called Ling Ling’s Bamboo Furniture Shack. It appeared in the third quarter.

This was the second year in a row that Salesgenie advertised in the Super Bowl with animated spots written by Gupta rather than an outside agency. This time, an outside agency, Creative Mint in San Francisco, handled production for the animation.

The commercial for Salesgenie during the Super Bowl last year was poorly received, but in that instance the complaints were about what viewers perceived as low production values and a hard-sell style. The debate over this year’s commercials and the decision to withdraw the pandas spot are indicative of increasing consumer sensitivity to marketing messages, particularly when ethnic images are involved.