Instead “bowing to their white master,” it could be construed that the workers are black and the manager is white. In other words, blacks do all the work while the white guy gets promoted to manager.
I just can’t see them being sprinters, either, and the lighting is such that their race is totally overshadowed by their positioning which, no matter how I look at it, reminds me of an Eastern religion bowing in prayer. Now, why they are bowing to the IT guy is beyond me: the straight-up interpretation is that this product will cause everyone in your office to bow to you in prayer, not in subservience, which makes no sense to me, but I can’t shake that perception.
Running doesn’t enter the picture for me.
The people that keep howling “how could Intel do this?” should really re-read Cuckoorex’s post. Something tells me that’s pretty close to the reality of the birth of this ad.
It’s easy to be “horrified” after the fact, but continuing to ignore the real and rational explanation given by others still doesn’t make any sense to me.
My first though on seeing the ad was that they were all in a cattle barn somewhere and that the office workers were being compared to anonymous cattle.
The I thought maybe it was supposed to represent a bunch of guys ready to get butt fucked.
I didn’t realize their skin was any different until I read the rest of the Snopes thing. It just looked like they were cattle in a shadowy barn somewhere.
So no, I didn’t find it offensive but I did find it kind of weird and creepy.
Man, you should have seen the ad they were going to use! In keeping with the sprinting motif, the office manager had a starting gun, except he was pointing it at the runners! And instead of a starting gun it was actually a rocket launcher!!!
Seriously though, an ad is bad if it turns off people to your product. This one may have done that, and so is a bad advertisement. It just seems silly to me to get particularly worked up about specific instances where racist undertones could possibly be read into something yet probably weren’t meant as such, when we are bombarded by hundreds of such things a day.
I often giggle at my TV when there are black families ‘talking black’ in ads or on TV. I think to myself, “is it reality, or is it racist? I wonder if anyone’s getting really pissed off watching this?”
There are so many cases in which we see women, minorities, mentally ill, foreigners, etc etc used and abused in advertising and popular media, that an ad that has racist undertones if one cannot identify its actual message barely illicits a blip on my radar.
But, to answer the OP, I do not find the ad offensive, but one of my observations about it would include the fact that someone probably goofed by making all the worker(s) black with a white boss.
I recall Robert Plant getting rather shrill about it as recently as the seventies, although he appeared to sympathize with the Vikings…
Pretty well my reaction too. Just looking at the ad, my first fleeting thought was that they were some sort of monks, getting ready for an orgiastic ritual involving anal sex. Though how this was supposed to sell computers escaped me. 
The fact that they were racially Black I couldn’t tell until really studying the pic, as they looked shadowed.
Actually, the office environment is just like that of any Intel office I’ve been to.
Which doesn’t mean I disagree with your comment about cattle. 
Yeah, I suppose but how many of us are buying computers for our company? If I were buying computers for my company, I’d probably just glaze over the ad and go down to the fine print. “Oh, intel’s got new computers, better look into that.”
Would anyone in a position to buy a bunch of new computers for their business even care about the ad? Has everyone run out and bought Macs because their computer ads are cute?