On Thu, Aug 27, 2009 at 4:50 PM, Igor Roshchin<[email protected]> wrote: > > What she said. > > On another hand, after thinking about it further, I am not > sure if it can be classified as racism. I am not even talking about > distinction of racism and xenophobia (or prejudice), although one can > argue that the latter in mono- or almost mono-national and mono-racial > countries could be prevailing. I am talking about effectiveness of > advertisement. > > It is typical and reasonable that any advertisement that is targeting > some particular population (or a part of it) uses means that appeal > to that population. The potential buyers need to be able to associate > themselves with the advertisement personages. > > Despite all PC hype, for most cases, companies like Victoria Secrets > do not advertise bras using male models. Tools/guns/... advertisements > tend to use male actors using them (with an exception of female actors > posing in bikini next to the advertised object - but that could be > considered even more sexist). Kid's toys advertisements use kids > playing with those toys, not the seniors. > Etc, etc. > There is nothing wrong with that. > > In Poland, obviously, the population is more racially uniform than, > say, in the US. Hence, it would be less effective to use people from other > races and even visually different nationalities to be in the pictures > (unless the stress is specifically on the international nature of the > advertised object). > One of the responses (unrelated to PDML) from Europe was that it's > strange that MS didn't try to replace the asian-looking person. > > So, I think, in this case, the situation would be equivalent to > replacing a picture of a man in an advertisement originally targeted > at men, with a picture of a woman, for the the ad is presented to a > female audience, or changing the age of the person, to match the targeted > audience... > > To summarize, - MS did a sloppy job - in many aspects, and > it may not be necessarily racism. > > Igor
While I agree on the whole, I'm not surprised they didn't remove the Asian individual, who could pass for one of several ethnic minorities that exist in the region that contains Poland. -- M. Adam Maas http://www.mawz.ca Explorations of the City Around Us. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
