Do you find this ad offensive?

[monstro]

I wish people who don’t see the offensiveness would get off the “People are being hypersensitive” kick. Because it’s exactly that kind of sentiment that keeps people from saying anything in a board meeting, when the final product is about about to be shipped off to the publisher. If that’s the kind of mentality that reigns in advertising, I’m glad I chose science as a career.

@Voyager

This might be a result of an excessive workload. I don’t know the Intel PR culture, but I know the Intel engineering culture, which sets the tone. It is rush, rush, rush, meeting, meeting, meeting. The Noyce building has six floors with over 20 conference rooms per floor, and they were full all the time. Whoever owned this image from the ad agency might have had to sign off on it after a one hour meeting, and not had time to reflect. Error rates go up with stress.

I don’t think anyone should blame Intel, although they’ve accepted responsibility. I think the responsibility lies with the crappy team at the ad agency. They’re supposed to be the experts.

@Voyager

At another company I worked for, there was a massive scandal over an illustration in an internal magazine. It was something about the global reach of the company, and they illustrated each continent with a cute cartoon - including a monkey for Africa. The agency, and the PR person who edited the magazine lost their jobs over this.
Different people have their sensitivity meters tuned to different levels based on their background and experience. That’s actually one of the good arguments for diversity.

That reminds me of a phone company commercial from years ago. I’m thinking either Sprint or AT&T. The ad was advertising international calling rates. The audience is “taken” all around the world, to multiple countries, where everyone’s talking on a phone. When we get to Africa, however, we are shown a chimpanzee out in the jungle. All the other places in the commercial get a nice-looking person to represent it, but Africa gets a crazy-looking ape.

There was some flack about it. While I wasn’t exactly foaming at the mouth, it did bother me that that was the image of Africa this commercial was putting out. It’s not like there’s a shortage of good-looking brothers over there.

I don’t think everyone should strive towards the same level of sensitivity, because that’s damn near impossible. But it does seem to me that people need to realize there’s a percieved subtext to everything we produce. Some of those perceptions are wacky and irrational. But when the unintended meaning is so blatant and easy to see from multiple stand-points, it’s counterproductive to accuse others of being crazy or racist(!) for seeing it.

[fessie]

@Walloon

What makes these men “black”? Their skin color is identical to mine in summertime, and my ancestry is Walloon/Irish/German.

It’s true that much of their skin is simply a white highlight accompanied by a deep shadow. My eyes go straight to the guy in the lower right, and the back of his head, which is the same color as Isaac Hayes (from the cover on the Live at the Sahara Tahoe album, specifically).

My MIL used to love sunbathing and she’d turn a really dark color. She’s Serbian, perhaps that’s part of her ancestry, I don’t know. She was dyeing her long, wavy hair a deep orange and wearing skimpy clothes for a while there when she was in her 50’s and had lost a lot of weight.

She was out West traveling around, and stopped outside a gas station to cool off and enjoy a Coke. Some old geezer walked up to her, said “I don’t know what [ethnicity] you are, but you’re beautiful” and gave her a dollar.

[Kozmik]

@Walloon

What makes these men “black”? Their skin color is identical to mine in summertime, and my ancestry is Walloon/Irish/German. Their faces are too obscured for us to see them, and they have no hair.

If I didn’t think they were sprinters, I would think they’d be Nepalese Buddhists.

[Kozmik]

@monstro

If that’s the kind of mentality that reigns in advertising, I’m glad I chose science as a career.

So instead of designing the Intel ads, you’d be designing the Intel chips.

[you_with_the_face]

@Walloon

I just looked through several dozen photos of “sprinters” at the Corbis website, and the sprinters in the photos are just as likely to be looking downward while at the starting blocks as they are to be looking forward.

That’s interesting. Thanks for digging those photos up.

I guess the next question is, how well does the “head-down sprinter pose” translate in an ad like this? Without other markers (such as a track, starting blocks, etc) the head-down posture makes it harder for me to register them as athletes ready to spring into action. I still say that if their heads were raised and they were crouched down more, the metaphor would be easier to grasp.

[Kozmik]

From the ad copy:

“Now you can boost productivity and efficiency by running multiple computing-intensive applications at once.”

[levdrakon]

@you with the face

That’s interesting. Thanks for digging those photos up.

I guess the next question is, how well does the “head-down sprinter pose” translate in an ad like this? Without other markers (such as a track, starting blocks, etc) the head-down posture makes it harder for me to register them as athletes ready to spring into action. I still say that if their heads were raised and they were crouched down more, the metaphor would be easier to grasp.

That’s why if I were in the ad biz, I’d probably replace the human sprinters with cheetahs or something.

Then an animal activist would claim the cheetahs were being oppressed.

I’d counter that they’re “uh… cheetahs. Known for speed.”

The animal activist would say, “how would I know that? I don’t watch animal shows. They clearly look oppressed to me.”

So we’d be back to my idea of just keeping to cute little stuffed animals and raceless-genderless-voiceless cartoons in safe colors.

Of course, I don’t work in the ad biz.

[monstro]

@levdrakon

That’s why if I were in the ad biz, I’d probably replace the human sprinters with cheetahs or something.

Then an animal activist would claim the cheetahs were being oppressed.

I’d counter that they’re “uh… cheetahs. Known for speed.”

The animal activist would say, “how would I know that? I don’t watch animal shows. They clearly look oppressed to me.”

So we’d be back to my idea of just keeping to cute little stuffed animals and raceless-genderless-voiceless cartoons in safe colors.

Of course, I don’t work in the ad biz.

Do you really think this would happen, or am I being whooshed?

[levdrakon]

@monstro

Do you really think this would happen, or am I being whooshed?

I think it’s why I don’t work in the ad biz.

[Justin_Bailey]

@monstro

But when the unintended meaning is so blatant and easy to see from multiple stand-points, it’s counterproductive to accuse others of being crazy or racist(!) for seeing it.

Except it’s not blatant to those of us that see the correct stand-point.

Why are we crazy because our first thought is to recognize exactly what Intel was referencing and ask “what’s the big effin deal?”

[you_with_the_face]

@Justin_Bailey

Except it’s not blatant to those of us that see the correct stand-point.

The ad was pulled for a reason.

What was that reason?

[Justin_Bailey]

@you with the face

The ad was pulled for a reason.

What was that reason?

That some people would fly off the handle with a knee jerk reaction that’s only slightly ground in reality. Or

C… Y… A…

I’d really like to know, among the people who saw racist connotations in this ad, why did you skip over the correct concept of the ad and several other rational reactions and jump straight to “racists!”?

[monstro]

@Justin_Bailey

Except it’s not blatant to those of us that see the correct stand-point.

Why are we crazy because our first thought is to recognize exactly what Intel was referencing and ask “what’s the big effin deal?”

No one is calling you crazy or racist. It’s “your” side who’s tossing all the names and acting all hysterical.

Why can’t you seem to understand that no one here is wrong or right?

[burundi]

Originally posted by Justin_Bailey
why did you skip over the correct concept of the ad and several other rational reactions and jump straight to “racists!”?

I didn’t “skip over” anything. My first gut reaction was “What the fuck?” and confusion, not “racists!” I quickly figured out that the guys were runners, but it’s definitely not the first thing that came to mind.

[you_with_the_face]

@monstro

No one is calling you crazy or racist. It’s “your” side who’s tossing all the names and acting all hysterical.

Yeah, he kinda lost me with the 32-size font back there.

[levdrakon]

@monstro

No one is calling you crazy or racist. It’s “your” side who’s tossing all the names and acting all hysterical.

Why can’t you seem to understand that no one here is wrong or right?

There are people here saying its offensiveness is “blatant” and “wrong on 30 different levels.”

That’s a teensy bit hysterical.

I think most of us are agreeing “eh, coulda been done better, if they’d thought about it.”

[Justin_Bailey]

@levdrakon

There are people here saying its offensiveness is “blatant” and “wrong on 30 different levels.”

That’s a teensy bit hysterical.

I think most of us are agreeing “eh, coulda been done better, if they’d thought about it.”

Exactly.

I can never manage the correct words myself, but someone else is always able to jump in with exactly what I was thinking.

Thank you levdrakon.

[monstro]

@levdrakon

There are people here saying its offensiveness is “blatant” and “wrong on 30 different levels.”

That’s a teensy bit hysterical.

I think most of us are agreeing “eh, coulda been done better, if they’d thought about it.”

I think the wrongness is blatant, yes. I don’t understand how people can not see how easily it is to interpret the track runners as darker-hued subservient clones, because without the track uniforms (already muted by the dim lighting) that’s exactly what they are. It’s not a stretch at all to see how this ad has an uncomfortable double meaning. It’s not one of those magic, 3-D pictures from the 90s that you have to stare at for five minutes. It’s right there on the surface, for anyone just flipping through a magazine to see. So in that way, yes, it’s blatant.

I don’t know why it’s hysterical to say this, nor is it a indictment against the people who can’t see it. A normal, intelligent person can miss blatant things all the time. That’s why we have car accidents.

[monstro]

@Justin_Bailey

I can never manage the correct words myself…

Staying away from the giant fonts might help.

[you_with_the_face]

@levdrakon

There are people here saying its offensiveness is “blatant” and “wrong on 30 different levels.”

That’s a teensy bit hysterical.

Or it could just be a difference in a opinion that has nothing to do with insanity or irrationality.

I think ywtf’s Law should have the collorary that the first person to accuse others of being hysterical in a race-related thread will be the main, if not only, poster exhibiting symptoms of hysteria in their writing.