Ad on the US Microsoft site, above, vs. ad on the Polish site, below
Earlier this week there was a mild uproar over the fact that someone working for Microsoft’s division in Poland made the dumb decision to use a stock photo of three people in an office for an ad, and Photoshop one of them into a different ethnicity by replacing his head. The man in the middle of the picture was originally an African-American guy, and the Polish version of the ad had a white man’s head clumsily pasted on the black man’s neck, with his darker hands still visible on a desk. It was a crude Photoshop job and looked awkward, with the man’s head at a strange angle. What’s more is that the guy whose head was replaced was sitting in front of a Macintosh laptop with the logo removed while another office-type woman was working at a computer that didn’t have the monitor plugged in. Without even considering the ramifications of the ethnicity switch, it was just a poorly done ad. If Microsoft contracted out to the agency who created it, someone should have noticed how crude it was and rejected the result.
Microsoft has now apologized for the ad and the resulting controversy, saying they’re looking into how it happened:
Software giant Microsoft apologized Wednesday for the apparent bad judgment that led to the head of a black model being swapped for that of a white model in an online advertisement.
The ad — which showed three business people, one Asian, one white and one black — was altered on Microsoft’s Web site for Poland to place the head of a white man on a black man’s body.
“We apologized, fixed the error and we are looking into how it happened,” said Lou Gellos, a Microsoft spokesman.
He said that because the company was still reviewing how the swap occurred he could not comment further.
On Microsoft’s official page on the social network site Twitter, a posting calls the swap “a marketing mistake” and offers “sincere apologies.”
The business Web site CNET.com, which first published reports of the swap, wrote that the change in models may have been made with the “racially homogeneous” Polish market in mind.
[From CNN.com]
PCWorld has an editorial that makes the argument that this is really a failure of Photoshop instead of a conspiracy. If someone had just replaced that guy entirely this photo wouldn’t be drawing as much attention. PCWorld also has an awesome gallery of other ad-related Photoshop failures. My favorite is the one below in which a young kid points to a picture of a woman’s ass on the computer. There’s no way that wasn’t deliberate. This mistake, on the other hand, seems incredibly amateur and not necessarily malignant.
Thanks to PCWorld for these photos
Well, more than 90% of people living in Poland are white, it’s understandable. You would not put a all ‘white’ add in Africa where 95% of the population is black. So please guys, dont start saying that this ‘mistake’ is racial.
Toe, actually, there are ads that are 100% white in Africa.
Toe, a small correction. Actually 97.3% of people living in Poland are what America considers “Caucasian” (By the way, isn’t it funny that there is Asian in Caucasian?). And majority of the 2.7% are Vietnamese and Chinese immigrants that migrated there in the mid 90’s. Surprising to some, there are a couple of Polish TV personalities that are of an African descent.
hmph, I wouldn’t have noticed itif it I was just flipping through a magazine. I don’t examine ads that closely, unless it’s 3 headed coworker typing on seahorse. Ok so I stretched it a tad, but whatevs.
haha! thats funny. Im sorry. I mean kind of racist but funny! Look at it! the hand is dark and the white guys head is all twisted! WTF? lol
Pardon me while I get didactic for a moment:
Under Apartheid, Chinese and Japanese were given the status of ‘honorary whites,’ Malays, no; South Asians no, even though under the classifications of human morphology South Asians are Caucasian.
Let me tell you something about Poland: why didn’t it ever have a navy? Because they kept having problems with the screen doors on the submarines.
End of lesson.
“Honorary whites”, White adds in Africa. Man…the world is a strange place. No wonder Michael morphed to white.
Recycling stock advertising photos…that’s just piss poor.
If they felt they needed to be “racially homogenous” why not just draw stick people. It would have been less tacky.
Racially homogeneous or not, I’m going to give the people of Poland the benefit of the doubt, and assume that their heads will not explode off of their foundations if they see a black person. I haven’t seen it happen, but maybe there’s still time.
‘Really? I thought negroes only existed in legend. Wow, I really have to rethink my stance on mermaids, manticores and the dreaded ‘esquilax’. Does anyone know if my money works ‘in black?’ Now it’s time for me to hang raspberries off the moon!’
Regardless of the target demographic or the marketing ploy, you will always find all-white advertisements for every product under the sun. I wouldn’t be surprised if one day I were to see a commercial with Sienna Miller flouncing about with a whole drum of ‘Soul-Glo’ in her hair.
The obsessive preoccupation with ‘whiteness’ goes the world over. And how better to re-affirm and re-inscribe that preoccupation than to set up an elaborate social and monetary infrastructure, instigate discourse, and then purposely exclude your target from that discourse by privileging whiteness further?
Well, I’m sure there will be lots of comments chastising me for steeping myself in trivialities and/or overreacting. I’m very calm about it, because this act is by no means unique or surprising. Heck, even over here it happens. Although, they usually just Photoshop the individuals who don’t pass the ‘paper bag test’ out of the picture.
Sooooo Polish people have NEVER seen a black person before?
They don’t have tvs, movies, internet, magazines, none of that stuff where a non-white person would just “pop up?”
You’re not saying much for Poland with that logic.
@ Really: “You’re not saying much for Poland with that logic.”
I thought I had that covered with the screen doors on submarines *shrug*
What I really want to know is what are they looking at…and why are so smiley???
Maybe the artist couldn’t find a hand to match the position of the subject and thought no one would notice. I can’t argue with thought process as why they chose to replace the image; however, that was pretty sloppy in its execution!
However, on further discussion, companies do it all time, using white images when selling anything in countries where the majority are non-whites. The only time this changes when companies want to promote products that are cheaper and harmful to its specific target audience (alcoholic beverages, and cigarettes and fried chicken). Yet, we can’t too many people of color on the covers of publications or television shows unless they are used as negative imagines.
There just incident of a publishing company changing a book cover by exchanging the imagine of the main character in the book in order to sell the book (as if others beyond a white audience wouldn’t be interested in purchasing the book) The incident occurred where a person of color’s image was replaced with that of white image. Never mind that the character in the books was a woman of color! Post racial anything my a**!
@ nona
Because the Wizard at the Keyboard was going to make the Token Black Guy disappear.
The Token Black Guy thought he was being transferred to France!
hahaha Bill Hicks
You beat me to it.
Insert polish joke here
Hey guys! I am from Poland. We love people of different ethicities, maybe because our country is rather homogenous (read “boring”) when it comes to race.
Bill Hicks is God
“Let me tell you something about Poland: why didn’t it ever have a navy? Because they kept having problems with the screen doors on the submarines.”
– That’s funny. We have those nonsense jokes about some other nationalities.
Agree with Giz, the photoshop job is crappy, very awkward looking. Looks like a beginner did that.
There are white ads posted everywhere all over the world so why aren’t other persons of color given the same consideration? I could care less about how “crappy” the job looks and care more about how they removed the black man to begin with. If Poland is so “white” then why keep the Asian guy in the picture too? Was the black man just too “dark” to stay? The racial implications of removing the black man’s head seems to be a much larger issue to me but instead the “uproar” really seems to be about how crappy the picture looks. Isn’t the large issue the racial one?