At best, people have ambivalent feeling about clowns.

On one end of the spectrum, there’s the relatively benign Bozo the Clown, a historic television favorite whose name implied entertaining, well-meaning buffoonery. There’s also the sad beauty of the crying clown of the opera Paglicci. Then, at the other end, the worst nightmare of anyone suffering from full-blown coulrophobia — the “scary clown.”

Pretty much any way you look at it, there’s not a lot of upside to being called a clown. So imagine my feelings when my PR firm sent me this post they found on Twitter about my company’s recent attendance at an Adobe trade show:

“I thought Sapient was a mgmt consulting co? They’re the booth next to us at Adobe Max and they’re complete clowns” –Message posted on Twitter by [name withheld], November 19, 2008

Read the rest of this article at AdAge.com.