What is this suppose to be, a Rorschach test?
So you’re going to ignore the quote from Intel’s VP of Marketing where they basically say “we’re sorry this got into a magazine”?
I can’t even get behind the outrage of “how could they not have noticed how offensive this is!” when dozens of people on this board (and dozens more on the Intel blog that posted the apology) didn’t see it until someone explained it to them.
Pretty much. Has anyone seen this ad outside of Snopes or outraged emails? If it’s found anywhere, I’ll take my statement back. I’ll also start emailing Intel to start giving projects to us on the grounds that the company they’re using does piss-poor design.
I didn’t. I had to read the snopes info to see why it was supposed to be offensive. I certainly didn’t see “black men bowing”. I saw athletes in an office and one really dorky guy in a suit.
I find it hard to believe they would knowingly do something so offensive, considering how the climate is towards perceived and actual racist insults. Don Imus, Michael Richards…why would they go out of their way to do something that would get such an outcry?
In a suit?
It could easily be run in a trade rag, which has relatively low circulation. Many ads I see in these assume the readers know a lot of stuff, so the image would speak parallel processing to those who were already familiar with the concept. I doubt it would be a good mass market ad.
A lot of advertisers in these magazines have run worse stuff than this, though usually sexist stuff. Not as bad as it was 15 years ago, though.
There was a billboard in San Jose for a company that rented CAD tools, that had the caption by the day, month or forever along with three women - a clearly hooker type, a date type and a wife type. Don’t underestimate the insensitivity of ad agencies handling high tech stuff, though Intel does usually do better.
True. My skepticism comes from the fact that the preliminary stages of most of the projects I work on are so far removed from the VP level that if a proposal mock-up got out and caused someone someone offense, prompting someone high up to send out an immediate CYA press release, I’d be stunned if the PR version of what happened was remotely close to reality.
It could happen, I could be wrong. But I’m rolling my eyes at some of the “It’s offensive on about 30 different levels” comments.
Hmmm…I didn’t see anything offensive in it either. I had to look at the Snopes page to work out what the fuss was about. I guess perhaps I’m just less sensitive than other people - all I saw was an office manager type of guy and a bunch of athletes. The skin colour of the people involved never really registered.
Ad people are paid lots of money to catch this kind of stuff. That’s their job.
Dozens of people can’t differentiate a simple calculus equation, but a mathematician should.
According to a number of bloggers, it was actually printed in the Dell catalog.
Walloon, I’m not saying that this is “definitive proof that racism still exists” or something like that (totally a subject for another thread). What I’m saying is that visuals carry meaning all on their own, completely separate from text. That’s why presidential campaigns are all red-white-blue, and why beer bottles are always at a 45-degree angle.
We don’t (generally) “reason” through imagery - we just react.
Fifty years ago people weren’t as aware of this - take a look at old advertisements in magazines, they’re very text-heavy and the imagery is secondary. Nowadays, though, the image is primary and the text - heck, sometimes there isn’t any at all. Television ads aren’t full of dialogue touting one product over another anymore - it’s all about images and associations.
Maybe people who watch more sports recognized the black men as sprinters immediately? I don’t know.
What I see is 6 black men bowing before one guy, which is hugely powerful (as it would be if they were 6 women, or 6 white men). Bowing is how we demonstrate submission, it just is - we bow to the Queen, we bow in prayer, we stare at the floor when our moms catch us stealing cookies.
I thought their job was the create the ad? Which they did, although the concept comes across poorly. But it would be very hard to see the concept and instantly jump to “racism!”
They wanted sprinters. They found a sprinter (or an image of a sprinter). The sprinter happens to be black. To them, this is unimportant. But it should be noted, most world class sprinters ARE black.
To found a nerdy office type (or an image of a nerdy office type). He happens to be white. Most nerdy office types ARE white.
The sprinter was placed in a starting block pose (as sprinters are wont to do) and then they were photoshopped to create six identical sprinters because computer processors are identical like that.
So tell me, why would that concept be considered racist to anyone? Why would the ad agency even consider such an interpretation when they know the obvious (to them) real meaning?
Because people who work in visual communication know that what they’re doing has meaning. Visual elements have meaning. If they didn’t, then any schmoe off the street could be doing their jobs.
Consider, too, that the ad was pulled from placement everyplace but the Dell catalogue, so somebody DID figure it out.
I get that it was pulled, all I’m arguing about is that the idea probably never crossed their minds during the creation of the concept because the concept is obviously not racist.
There are only two real visual elements to this ad:
A sprinter in a starting block position
A nerdy office manager
The sprinter was chosen for speed. The office manager was chosen because you need a nerd looking happy with your product in IT. That’s all there is to it.
Odds are, once the sprinter image was chosen, there was never discussion about “the black sprinter,” he was just “the sprinter.”
And the fact that it took so long to be pulled (where it was likely seen by at least one black person or two), shows that the ad can’t be as “obviously” racist as many are making it out to sound.
I don’t see a sprinter in a starting position (or, I didn’t until I read the Snopes article).
I see several black men bowing their heads to a white guy.
I totally agree, though, that the concept isn’t racist in the least. Should they have avoided using only black sprinters? I don’t know.
Ok, I’ll back off from my earlier claim.
Ok. I used to be a sprinter and my whole family has been involved in track & field since before I was born, so for me, the idea that they can be seen as anything but sprinters is completely alien to me. Even after all the discussion, the claims that the picture is racist still sound to me like Chris Rock’s Nat X character trying to find racism in anything involving something black and something white. I take your viewpoint as a sincere one, but the image you see is completely different from the one I see.
I have to say, I saw both at the same time. Would have made more sense if the runners were facing out, and the honky was walking down the aisle behind em. Damn stupid on the adv’s part. They should know better.
The Starbucks thing is crap. IMO, they could have come out with that the same hour the towers fell and it’s nothing better, worse or different than any other of their ads.
That’s like saying the job of a car manufacturer is to produce a car; nevermind if they produce one like runs like shit and chugs down gasoline at 15 miles per gallon.
The concept is not at fault. It’s the execution.
If their thinking is that simplistic and one-dimensional then they should think about going into another profession, because they will probably run into this problem again and again. An image with six black sprinter clones bowing down before with a rather smug-looking white manager says more that the ad’s text was communicating. It really doesn’t take any eye-squinting to see that, either.
Most of us just glanced at the ad and got a real basic impression of it, so its understandable that laymen would not see any problems with it at first blush. But for people who are paid to produce effective ads, it’s surprising that they were blind to the flaws, especially given that they probably had weeks if not months to dissect and analyze the thing to pieces.
Were these ad people supposed to have been born yesterday, in a galaxy far far away? I think that’s the only condition that would excuse them for failing to recognize the problems in that final product. That, and blindness. Which is not to suggest that anything about this was intentional. Only that the mistake involved here is tantamount to a computer programmer screwing up a really basic piece of code and having no one catch it until the final software package was released onto the market.
To prevent such controversy in the future, Madison Avenue should create ads featuring white people and separate, equivalent ads featuring black people.
You know, I find something which from what I see in the snopes site nobody thought of, but which I was expecting from the OP’s description:
it’s all guys!
One of the tasks I’ve done at work quite often is translate corporate training materials. The Made-in-the-USA ones always had every person in the examples be a veteran male, trying to make the point I imagine that “even if you’ve been doing your job for a long time, you can make mistakes.” With my supervisor’s blessings, I gave the examples a “diversity shake” before our guys had time to yell “they’re attacking the veterans!”