Complete and Utter Zebu

Do you ever wonder whether those oh-so-clean-and-tidy people in company literature and advertising really work there or are simply models who have the sort of appearance companies WISH their employees would have?

There’s a brilliant blog from Fair Trade Photographer which shows just why we should assume the latter. The pic above, for instance, has been used all over the place. Chris Barton, who writes the blog, found instances of its use as far afield as Germany and the Far East.

And in Complete and Utter Zebu, there’s a wonderful example of an ethnically diverse group of people in an online advert for Microsoft’s IT tools. When it came to advertising in Poland, however, the black guy was edited out in favour of a more typically ethnic Pole. If their Photoshop artist hadn’t forgotten to change the colour of his hand perhaps nobody would have noticed.

Fair Trade Photographer: Microstock: why would a reputable company do this to themselves?