Microsoft has a new major add campaign titled "Are your people ready?" You can see on in the April 17 Newsweek page E13 (Enterprise center section).
In this ad it pictures 18 people representing the employees of your company. The people for these ads are very carefully selected - they don't say send over the first 18 people that showed up today at central casting. For a campaign like this Microsoft certainly reviewed hundreds, if not thousands of head shots to select the 18 that would represent the generic company ready to maximize their high tech investment.
And what is the racial and gender makeup of this group? 4 women, 2 Asian, 2 Hispanic, and 0 African-American. So apparently Microsoft figures the average company is 78% male and 78% white while being 0% African-American. Oh, and the old people are all stuck in the back of the group.
So what is going on here? Why is Microsoft presenting the employees of "your company" as a white male group? Do they figure that those making the purchasing decision view their companies this way? About the only place in corporate America that is still this segregated is the boardrooms of the Fortune 500 and even that bastion of white male-ness has African-American members.
What message is Microsoft trying to send in these ads? I'm not saying it's racism - but it is weird...
Update:
Anyone who sees one of these ads (printed today or earlier) please scan and email to me. I will then post all of them here so people can draw their own conclusions about the racial & gender spread across all of the ads.
- Newsweek 4/17 (above comments)
- Fortune 5/1 pg 26 - (80% white, 74% male)
Update 2:
I have never had to do this before but I deleted several posts that were both racist & mean. You are welcome to disagree but if you want the comment on my blog, do it professionally and do not use derogatory terms. It is amazing how a discussion of race brings out the worst in some people. (Discussions of Microsoft too - so combining the topics really brings out the loonies.)
Also, my point is not that the ad shows Microsoft to be racist or that all ads should show a correct cross section of our society. My point was that with so many people in the ad it was unusual that it was so predominately white & male. And that clearly Microsoft made a decision to have it be unusually (by the standards of ads of that type by major corporations) white & male.
Trackbacks: ColoradoPols, DailyKos, Mudville Gazette
