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A White woman, an Asian guy, and a Black guy are seated around a table. No, it's not the lead-in to a joke of questionable appropriateness. Rather, it's the source of the latest on-line controversy about race.
Welcome to the tale of the competing Microsoft ads. As the story goes, there's a photo on the American version of the microsoft.com website depicting the three individuals I described above. Sounds innocent enough, right? Problem is, intrepid bloggers found a doctored version of the same photo on the Polish version of the site, except in this one, the Black man in the middle has been digitally replaced by a White man.
Microsoft has already admitted that the photo was doctored and has issued an apology. Now I'm often accused of seeing racial controversy where others see none (see here, here, or here, just for starters), but I have to admit, I'm having a hard time getting worked up over this one.
So the marketing folks at Microsoft think the racial composition of an ad might make a difference? And they're willing to pull a few strings to put that strategy into play? How does this make them any different than any other company that looks more diverse in advertisements than in reality? Or the colleges and universities that inevitably wind up with a diverse group of students on the cover of their admissions guide or webpage, even if such heterogeneity is elusive on their actual campus?
What makes the Microsoft case different (and interesting), of course, is that they weren't airbrushing diversity into their picture but rather out of it. Presumably the marketing department figured that Poland has a more homogeneous society than the U.S., so they modified the conference table trio accordingly. In a photo I often show to academic audiences when giving presentations about my own research, a few years ago the University of Wisconsin sparked the opposite controversy when they altered a shot of an all-White stadium crowd to include a Black student who wasn't really there (see the seemingly disembodied head hovering on the left margin of the photo).
But, still, I'm having a hard time seeing the Microsoft example as all that controversial. It just seems like business as usual. When it comes to advertising, I know that most products won't make me as attractive as the models who wear them in ads; I realize that most celebrity endorsers don't really drive those cars or drink those drinks; I recognize that most corporations and campuses aren't as diverse as they make themselves out to be in glossy brochures.
I mean, it's not as if Microsoft is airbrushing their actual employees out of an ad for the purpose of appealing to a particularly closed-minded customer. That would be a problem. This is just a staged photo to begin with of individuals who don't really work together and probably have no corporate background at all. Rather than underhandedly trying to come off as more diverse than they really are (like Wisconsin did), Microsoft altered this photo to make it seem more realistic/accessible to their target audience.
Now, I'm not implying that photos like these don't have an impact. They do. Dr. Valerie Purdie-Vaughns from Columbia University has found in her research that how a company depicts itself visually can have profound effects on people's attitudes. Specifically, Black professionals shown brochures for a fictitious company felt more trust towards it when the workforce was depicted as diverse versus non-diverse. Whites, too, are influenced by the diversity they see around them, as in some of my research we've found that the mere expectation of being part of a diverse group is sufficient to change people's attitudes and thought processes. And one can only imagine that false images of diversity can come back to haunt the company or college whose paying patrons eventually find out that all is not as it was made to seem.
Microsoft may have apologized for their digital racial engineering, but their manipulation of an already staged photo doesn't strike me as the sign of the apocalypse that others seem to think it is. If anything, to me the real moral of this story would be that if you're going to change the complexion of the head of one of the actors in your photo, probably a good idea to change the hand as well to match it (see below).
But, hey, they're the marketing gurus, not me. Maybe that's what executives look like in Poland.
Microsoft photos:
