I've been sitting on this picture for awhile, pondering it. And the more I ponder it, the less sense it makes to me. The blood drive part of it is fine; I'm all for blood drives (even though the Red Cross refused to take my blood for a few years). There's nothing offensive about it. It doesn't use vulgar language. But something just doesn't seem quite right.

The problem is the picture of that woman. What does she have to do with blood donation? Is she a donor? A recipient? A nurse? It doesn't say.

This poster turned up in the elevators at work a couple weeks ago, advertising our blood drive that's coming up soon. So, thinking it was produced in-house, I gave it a pass. Of course they're just going to use whatever picture they have available--it could even be someone in the building who agreed to pose for a picture so they'd have a picture on there.

But then I saw the same poster (with some of the information changed) at the hospital. Same woman.

So, convinced that it's not someone I work with, I can critique the poster.

I'm not saying she's not a nice person, or that she's inherently evil, or that there are evil designs in using her image in the advertisement, but why is she there?

Sure, advertisers have used pictures of pretty women to advertise their products for a long time, but she's not exceptionally pretty. Pretty ordinary-looking, really. Certainly not ugly, but nobody you'd even look at twice in the elevator (unless she's on a poster). Nope, she's not on there for her looks.

She's not a nurse or else she'd be wearing one of those cool hats, or at least scrubs. If she were a nurse, they'd be exploiting that pretty good. So, no, not a nurse.

With her hands folded in front of her like that she seems to be waiting; like she's the potential recipient of donated blood. But, then again, she looks too healthy to need blood (although her face is pretty pale).

She probably represents the common, everyday person who would be most likely to donate blood in a workplace environment. That's the only thing that seems to make any sense. But still, why her? Why not someone else? Or something other than a person?

Maybe having an ordinary, non-descript person standing there is better than the alternative: a big, boring bag of blood.
(I didn't have time to shade the background of the picture the way I would have liked, but you get the idea.)