Marketing Decapitation In Poland: Asians Ok, Blacks Maybe Not

Michael Arrington

J. Michael Arrington (born March 13, 1970 in Huntington Beach, California) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TechCrunch, a blog covering startups and technology news. Arrington attended Claremont McKenna College (BA Economics, 1992) and Stanford Law School (JD, 1995) and practiced as a corporate and securities lawyer at two law firms: O’Melveny & Myers and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich... → Learn More

Tuesday, August 25th, 2009


A reader sent in links to two identical Microsoft marketing sites. One is a standard U.S./English version, the other in Polish.

The image is identical, except Microsoft has removed the head of the black man in the U.S. version and photoshopped in a white guy’s head instead. The Asian man and white woman made the cut to the Polish site unscathed. Clicking back and forth between the two pages is actually kind of creepy.

The original model’s hand was left in the Polish version of the ad.

Photoshop Disasters, which also wrote about this, has some great comments:

“I like how that computer monitor isn’t plugged into anything.”

“Leave the white Macbook front and center in a MicroSoft Ad? You’d have thought that was the first thing they’d Photoshop out…”

“It’s okay if he has a black hand.”

Update: We’re taking this completely off the rails. Read, photoshop, and win a free Bing Tshirt.

Tags:
blog comments powered by Disqus