One of the things you may not know about public relations is that, often, when they are in a pinch to find photos to include with press releases, they will simply take some of the agency’s own employees and photograph them with the particular product that are publicizing.
In his fifteen months with the PR agency where he works, Tawn has been in photos for several clients. But often times these photos have not actually been selected by a media outlet for publishing. Last week, Tawn’s photo was used by one of the Thai language news dailies in an article about Microsoft.
The background to this photos is that they were shooting in the office and using several other employees, all younger than Tawn. Then they came over and asked Tawn to pose. The photographer paused and asked Tawn to put on a pair of glasses and drape his sweater over his shoulders. Tawn’s interpretation: they needed a more “mature” looking model than the other, younger ones.
Sorry about the quality of the photo – it is from a clipping service and is a copy of a fax.
The day that the article was published, I met Tawn for lunch and he was wearing his glasses (they are only reading glasses). After he told me about the article, I put two and two together: he was wearing the glasses out and about in the hope he’d be recognized on the street!
christao408 
When I did an ad for HIV testing for San Francisco last year, I too hoped that I’d be recognized in the streets. But I guess doing public health announcements, you don’t want to be recognized. Thank god my ad didn’t proclaim, “I have syphilis.”
That’s hilarious!
Or, alternatively, people could have come up to you on the street and asked for the results of your test. How rude!