What are the odds on another racist Microsoft photo flub?
By Nicole Kobie in Editorial
Posted in Uncategorized on
Yesterday, news broke that Microsoft comms people in Poland had PhotoShopped a white guy’s head onto a black guy in a promotional photo. The racial editing was fairly noticeable as the hopefully-now-unemployed would-be photo editor had failed to change the guy’s hands over, too.
White face, black hands — sure, that looks natural.
The incident showed Microsoft’s Polish comms staff up as possibly racist, likely stupid, and definitely incompetent at PhotoShop.
Bookies Paddy Power have managed to follow that exceptionally bad PR move with a rather brilliant one of their own, by publishing the odds on the racial mix of the promotional pics for the Office 2010 launch. Will the cover shots be a bunch of white folks, or another hands and face racial mix?
Paddy Power actually expect that Microsoft’s learned its lesson, and think there will be a variety of races on display — but they do see it as pretty unlikely we’ll get ads with just Black and Asian or just White and Asian people. If you disagree, hey, there may be money to be made, if you’re the gambling type.
From Paddy Power, here’re the odds for the race of those who appear in Office 2010 global print advertising launch campaign:
11/10 White, Afro-American and Asian
9/4 White and Afro-American
4/1 White only
6/1 Afro-American only
8/1 Asian only
10/1 Afro-American and Asian
12/1 White and Asian
Maybe when they’re done taking bets on the racial sensitivity of Microsoft’s advertising, they’ll open the books for some other bets: Will Office 2010 arrive on time? Will Windows Mobile 6.5 ever arrive? Who could win in a fight, Steve Jobs or Steve Ballmer?
Rated: 100% (1 votes)
Loading ...Comment by Pater Mann - August 27, 2009 on 4:13 pm
Reading the comments on Neowin about this, it appears that it is more likely a case of dodgy targetted marketing rather than racism. There are actually very few black people in Poland and many Poles have never seen one so it probably made sense to marketing to replace the black man with a white one for the Polish ad. However, not changing the hand is a blunder as is the fact that the laptop he is using looks rather like a MacBook!
Comment by dreamhunk - August 28, 2009 on 5:36 am
I have a nice link you tell me if it’s raceist
http://www.dailymotion.pl/video/x500y1_bbc-inside-sport-poland-football-ra_sport
Pingback by - August 28, 2009 on 10:53 am
[…] Microsoft has since apologized. US version vs. Poland Photoshopped version: Full story here: IT PRO: Blogs: Nicole Kobie: What are the odds on another racist Microsoft photo flub? __________________ Brett Rogers changed my […]
Comment by trendy - September 3, 2009 on 6:43 am
What is it about Poland and Photoshopping? Check out both the English and Polish versions of the following website. Notice a difference? So Microsoft isn’t alone
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