I'm not an American, don't know what it's really like there. It seemed a bit unlikely to me that a typical office would be so colour coordinated (except of course for white) but I didn't know. So I asked. Sorry if that offended you.
Fair enough, and no real offense. I apologize too, I came off a bit harsher in my response than intended.
Well, that issue is pennypinching. Ads are completely manufactured images, fake before during and after the actual photos are taken. In this case the faking was rather too obvious. For instance, it looks rather like the (formerly) black guy has an Apple laptop, though the logo seems to have disappeared....
Well, I would agree with this point on some levels, but I think there are different degrees to which ads may go to present their desired message (sure they're all lies, but some lies are bigger than others). Not wanting to get too deeply mired in details of selecting for and selecting against a target audience, let me just say that to me there is a difference between a magazine cover airbrushing a model to artificially "idealize" her physique (though I also find this annoying and wish they wouldn't) and artificially replacing an already present individual with someone else entirely to "idealize" their portrayed work environment. If one needs to go that far then again I'd say it would just be more prudent (if only from a PR standpoint, seeing the results this situation has generated) to find a completely different image to use. One instance is altering a person to make them "better", and another is rejecting a person saying another type of person is "better". Not really as big since, as you point out, the whole ad is fake to begin with, but there are instances where places have done this with candid photos that actually did portray a reality they weren't satisfied with.
98% of ads are insulting. Even more so the ones I see online. It's only because it's Microsoft that it's even slightly newsworthy -- that a large American company would do something bound to piss off people like yourself if it came to light.
Well, truth be told this is just a general pet peeve of mine, and contrary to how it may have sounded, I react the same when they're replacing a white guy with black faces, or shopping in extra women into a board-room to pretend they don't have a glass ceiling. My initial response to you though was to point out that this type of diversity isn't unheard of in the US, but when companies have to go out of their way to so obviously fake it (or in this case, double-fake it), it starts crossing some lines. The real insult here (even more so than the racial one really) is that they thought this really shoddy job was acceptable.
Some of the more obnoxious cheapskate ad campaigns like the "Adult Friendfinder" that presents me photos of skanky blonde bimbos with their legs gaping, while telling me that they live in my neighbourhood (determined by my IP). A neighbourhood where 99.5% of the people are Chinese. Those ads insulted me in so many different ways that it motivated me to set up an effective ad blocker on my PCs. That's all you can do with stupid ads, block them.
Well, here I just have to agree 100%. I find some forms of targeted ads to be less "offensive" than others (at least they're trying to show me things I might be interested in), but this form of targeted ad is just, as you say, stupid.