Dove’s campaign for real beauty is getting more subversive, more shocking, and more touching with it’s recent edition of this video “Onslaught“. This ad goes much further IMHO than their previous commercial “evolution” which showed how photoshop can transform an average looking girl into, as the huffington post calls it a “glamazon”. Onslaught provides a montage of the impossibly beautiful and sexy, clips of the overused superlatives in womens advertising, coupled with the graphic extreme measures that some will take to get there from surgery to bulimia.
What Dove succeeds at here is creating something sharable, meaningful, and conversational, it’s something worth talking about. Sure they are trying to sell soap, but they are also trying to bring some attention to the undesirable effect of the objectification of people and more specifically in this case women. I don’t unnecessarily think Dove or Unilever is altruistic, but it’s often just good business to stand apart from the competition, especially for something that a large portion of the thinking population can actually buy into, that’s what Patagonia did.
Some say Dove is having a polarizing effect on the industry being called everything from pretentious, manipulative, self-serving, and hypocritical. Amy Jussel at the Shaping Youth blog has a pretty comprehensive wrap up that’s worth a look. My experience in the blogosphere so far has been pretty positive although some of the comments on those blog posts are more vitriolic. Joseph Jaffe has a good post on it here.
What I hear levelled against the campaign is that Unilever also run campaigns for their Lynx product (men’s deodorant) where women are sex objects. Women can be presented in different lights, simply to sell a particular product line.
Mmm, the Axe/Lynx product is actually selling a product to men and the story the ad portrays is more an over the top parody. Besides Unilever probably has little influence over the advertising either dove or lynx/axe produce.
Agree that parent companies rarely give a rat’s patooie what the underlings are doing. (and vice-versa, I might add) Having once belonged to the Edelman/Interpublic-mega-moguls of yore, I’ve learned not to dig too deep on the brand front or you’ll strike fool’s gold despite what you’re seeking in authenticity…or hope for a ‘clean sell through.’
That said, one man’s ‘over the top parody’ is another’s drooling, lustful, objectification…Fine line there, I’m afraid, and probably too thin for extrapolation. (unless we continue this over lunch in Dec. w/the other AOC co-authors, I’m game!
Guess all in all I just feel Dove did a grand ol’ job getting attention, whether to sell soap/for themselves, build awareness as a bonus, or plant a seed among a few of my dear colleagues that there truly IS a ‘trickle down impact’ on kids…Point is, it’s working to stir the pot and open new dialog in ‘the age of conversation.’
p.s. If I had one message to our colleagues it would be, “hey people, this is not all CLIO-Cannes statue stuff…there are REAL faces behind the messages here, and kids are getting sucked into the vortex of shoulds and coulds and wannabes and Dove did a dang good job of pointing this out…
So, for that I applaud it, despite all the NUMEROUS contradictions behind the brandwashing of parent company Unilever’s “Fair & Lovely” skin lightening agents,’ Slim Fast, Axe, or any of the other silliness…After all, “Real beauty” is in the eye of the beholder, n’est ce pas? Campaign, or not.
In the tagline, “talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does”, I think quotes around beauty would have been appropriate. “beauty” industry.