Those clever people at Dove...

[domjoe]

...have done it again.

After their striking first UK ad campaign last year , they've topped it with the even better Campaign For Real Beauty.

Women, be sure to vote!

 

[Guest]

I saw several of their billboards in Yorkshire and loved them.

Hooray! Perdita

 

[Guest]

sweet
ty

 

[dizzylia]

I loved that link. Thank you very much!


-dizzy

 

[English Lady]

Joe....weird I was going to start a thread on the same thing

 

[Guest]

Wrinkled or wonderful?

Dove's new adverts won't change my shopping habits - and they certainly won't change the world

Marina Hyde
Friday January 7, 2005
The Guardian

There comes a time in the life of many advertisers' egos when they have to make a decision. Are they people who flog cornflakes, or have they begun to fancy themselves as part of the social fabric of the nation? Buoyed up by its last campaign, which featured several size 14-ish women loitering against a photo-graphers' backdrop in their underwear, Dove has plumped for the latter, and this week unveiled a series of posters featuring yet more "real women". There's Irene, the 96-year-old great-grandmother, (Wrinkled or wonderful? asks the poster, offering helpful tick boxes), someone with freckles, and four other ladies whose unconventional beauty we are invited to celebrate.

It reminds me of all those self-consciously iconoclastic Benetton ads of days gone by. Ah, an Aids victim on his deathbed. Which reminds me: I must go and buy a crew-necked lambswool jersey. A shopping list that would be inspired again and again by the revelation that black people and white people can hold hands, priests and nuns kiss, and that people on death row look rather glum. It was, like, totally beyond knitwear!

Daryl Fielding, a female executive at Ogilvy & Mather, the agency that came up with the Dove ads, has maintained in the interviews heralding the campaign that it is entirely feasible to do social good while sticking to your primary goal of selling stuff. "Other advertisers tend to feature pin-thin women who are 20 if they are a day," she explained this week. "We know from research with consumers that they find those images ridiculous."

This cruel slight to the model community aside, I can't help feeling that Daryl's being slightly disingenuous - not altogether unusual in her line of work. Anthropologists have traditionally argued that humans are capable of purely altruistic acts: that debate becomes rather more one-sided when we look at the advertising community.

Certainly, most ads targeted at women feature an airbrushed fantasy and offer the promise that you too can look like this if only you purchase the featured snake oil. But is depicting "ordinary" women - we'll come to the inverted commas later - in order to sell a product really any more honest? Because here's the crucial thing: it's still snake oil. I don't want to get bogged down in the the specifics of one-quarter moisturiser, ceramides or any of the other cod science that peppers female grooming ads. But if there was a single piece of evidence proving that Dove was better than Imperial Leather or Tesco own brand, then trust me, six "ordinary" models would be out of work and we'd be reading facts instead.

On this basis, the Dove posters feel rather patronising: a sleight of hand where the illusion of honesty in one area allows the greater deception to sneak under the wire. Namely, that they are not trying to sell you something, that this something is in some meaningful way different to everything else, and that women need it and must spend ever more money on it. I can't help feeling less lied to by an ad for a soap featuring a supermodel, who only a moron would think they'd resemble if they used said product, than by a gaggle of "ordinary" women who are none the less terribly well lit and look suspiciously airbrushed in parts.

Which brings us to their ordinariness. If Daryl and co really wanted a challenge, perhaps they could set about making genuinely ordinary women look beautiful. Not your bejewelled 96-year-olds who look 60 but, you know, ordinary women. Women on the school run, women in Asda, women who really meant to wash their hair that morning but the kids were acting up and something had to give. Women in tracksuits. It's not beyond the realms, given that the photographer chosen for the past two Dove campaigns was Rankin, who co-founded Dazed & Confused magazine - just the kind of publication that has been wont to make a lot of things appear beautiful, right down to heroin addiction.

But I think it's fair to say that day is fairly far off. So while we wait with bated breath for it to dawn, let's not forget that the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is in fact the Dove Campaign to Shift Soap.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Wrinkled or wonderful?

Dove's new adverts won't change my shopping habits - and they certainly won't change the world

Marina Hyde
Friday January 7, 2005
The Guardian

There comes a time in the life of many advertisers' egos when they have to make a decision. Are they people who flog cornflakes, or have they begun to fancy themselves as part of the social fabric of the nation? Buoyed up by its last campaign, which featured several size 14-ish women loitering against a photo-graphers' backdrop in their underwear, Dove has plumped for the latter, and this week unveiled a series of posters featuring yet more "real women". There's Irene, the 96-year-old great-grandmother, (Wrinkled or wonderful? asks the poster, offering helpful tick boxes), someone with freckles, and four other ladies whose unconventional beauty we are invited to celebrate.

It reminds me of all those self-consciously iconoclastic Benetton ads of days gone by. Ah, an Aids victim on his deathbed. Which reminds me: I must go and buy a crew-necked lambswool jersey. A shopping list that would be inspired again and again by the revelation that black people and white people can hold hands, priests and nuns kiss, and that people on death row look rather glum. It was, like, totally beyond knitwear!

Daryl Fielding, a female executive at Ogilvy & Mather, the agency that came up with the Dove ads, has maintained in the interviews heralding the campaign that it is entirely feasible to do social good while sticking to your primary goal of selling stuff. "Other advertisers tend to feature pin-thin women who are 20 if they are a day," she explained this week. "We know from research with consumers that they find those images ridiculous."

This cruel slight to the model community aside, I can't help feeling that Daryl's being slightly disingenuous - not altogether unusual in her line of work. Anthropologists have traditionally argued that humans are capable of purely altruistic acts: that debate becomes rather more one-sided when we look at the advertising community.

Certainly, most ads targeted at women feature an airbrushed fantasy and offer the promise that you too can look like this if only you purchase the featured snake oil. But is depicting "ordinary" women - we'll come to the inverted commas later - in order to sell a product really any more honest? Because here's the crucial thing: it's still snake oil. I don't want to get bogged down in the the specifics of one-quarter moisturiser, ceramides or any of the other cod science that peppers female grooming ads. But if there was a single piece of evidence proving that Dove was better than Imperial Leather or Tesco own brand, then trust me, six "ordinary" models would be out of work and we'd be reading facts instead.

On this basis, the Dove posters feel rather patronising: a sleight of hand where the illusion of honesty in one area allows the greater deception to sneak under the wire. Namely, that they are not trying to sell you something, that this something is in some meaningful way different to everything else, and that women need it and must spend ever more money on it. I can't help feeling less lied to by an ad for a soap featuring a supermodel, who only a moron would think they'd resemble if they used said product, than by a gaggle of "ordinary" women who are none the less terribly well lit and look suspiciously airbrushed in parts.

Which brings us to their ordinariness. If Daryl and co really wanted a challenge, perhaps they could set about making genuinely ordinary women look beautiful. Not your bejewelled 96-year-olds who look 60 but, you know, ordinary women. Women on the school run, women in Asda, women who really meant to wash their hair that morning but the kids were acting up and something had to give. Women in tracksuits. It's not beyond the realms, given that the photographer chosen for the past two Dove campaigns was Rankin, who co-founded Dazed & Confused magazine - just the kind of publication that has been wont to make a lot of things appear beautiful, right down to heroin addiction.

But I think it's fair to say that day is fairly far off. So while we wait with bated breath for it to dawn, let's not forget that the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is in fact the Dove Campaign to Shift Soap.

I agree.

I had hoped that it was actually something about the kind of people they were- that kind of beauty. It's still too much focused on external beauty as the only standard to please me.

I don't think there's been 'only one standard of beauty' for a really long time. Like since 1950 something.

Not meant to be harsh. So I hope it doesn't sound it.

I'm still so sick...

 

[domjoe]

Joe....weird I was going to start a thread on the same thing

Well, I hope Dove stop being the only company to use real people in their ads. I'm amazed that nobody else seems to have done so, yet.

 

[domjoe]

Chilled, I've got so fed up of your random posts, that I wouldn't have noticed your very interesting post here, had S&P not quoted it, becuase I'd put you on ignore. Please reserve "ChilledVodka" for your "serious" persona! (now taking you off ignore)

I think that in Britain media type jouranlists (the Guardian is the media people's newspaper) are so used to being snide and cynical that they're actually frightened to admit that a lot of advertisers are at least as culturally savvy as they are.

I think that the fact that Dove are showing non-stereotypical women in theirs has a signifcant effect on people's thinking. And a lot more people will see the Dove women than will read Marina Hyde's articel.

 

[Guest]

It's still too much focused on external beauty as the only standard to please me.

Boy, you've a monsterous ego.

 

[sweetnpetite]

Boy, you've a monsterous ego.

I know.

I am all that!

 

[domjoe]

I agree.

I had hoped that it was actually something about the kind of people they were- that kind of beauty. It's still too much focused on external beauty as the only standard to please me.

Good point -- but then you'd need some kind of biography to go with the images to show how they are beautiful personalities, not just beautiful looking. These ads work on images alone.

 

[sweetnpetite]

I also think I'd be almost insulted to be labled "Real Beauty" in this context.

Although I did feel that my grandmothers wrinkles made her beautiful

I guess it just reminds me of the kind of backhanded compliments catty girls exchange in middle school. "Oh I just LOVE your outfit. Did you find it on the sale rack at Salvation Army? No REALLY, I want to know so I can get one JUST like it." (walks away snickering.)

I'm not bitter...

 

[domjoe]

Well, I'd love to meet the fat one, and so would about 90% of heterosexual men, I think. Also the white-haired lady and some of the others.

 

[Guest]

CV's posted article is a bit too begrudging (predictable for the Guardian, which is also trying to sell something). No one would argue Dove is selling soap, but I think the ads are a start for something promoting women's beauty that is out of the ordinary.

I don't need to know those women's bios, the beauty is there, on and below the surface. Wrinkles in themselves don't make anyone's grandmother beautiful; it's what caused the wrinkles that does it. (See the dark bags under Anna Magnani's eyes for an example.)

I wish the American Dove co. would follow suit.

Perdita

 

[sweetnpetite]

I know Rene Zellwegger looked better with a little meat on her bones.

I actually heard that 'Edge of Reason' was a guy favorite just to see the beafier version. Or something like that.

I'd like to see more of this "different beauty" without it being so self concious about itself.

For instance. Xena was hot, but she wasn't skinny. And I never really noticed anyone talking about her as a "plus sized beauty" or "unconventional beauty"

I think that the media should show more variety, but there's just something about the adjective that's offputing. Even "Real Beauty"



Why not just say they are beautiful and leave it at that?

 

[sweetnpetite]

CV's posted article is a bit too begrudging (predictable for the Guardian, which is also trying to sell something). No one would argue Dove is selling soap, but I think the ads are a start for something promoting women's beauty that is out of the ordinary.

I don't need to know those women's bios, the beauty is there, on and below the surface. Wrinkles in themselves don't make anyone's grandmother beautiful; it's what caused the wrinkles that does it. (See the dark bags under Anna Magnani's eyes for an example.)

I wish the American Dove co. would follow suit.

Perdita

Good points perdita.

But in the case of my grandmother, I really liked the soft way her face felt when I touched it.

And she really was a beautiful (in the purely physical sence of the word) woman.

And of course, she was beautiful because I loved her.

 

[English Lady]

Well, I hope Dove stop being the only company to use real people in their ads. I'm amazed that nobody else seems to have done so, yet.

I think the media have honed in on one type of "beautiful" for far too long. A certain age bracket, and a certain few select sizes.

I think it's a breath of fresh air to see women of all ages and sizes appearing in these ads. Ok so yes they're odingit to sell something but they must thinkit WILL sell products to do it.

They know we're sick of seeing the same old same old and I'm glad they've taken the chance on showing a different look.

 

[shereads]

...have done it again.

After their striking first UK ad campaign last year , they've topped it with the even better Campaign For Real Beauty.

Women, be sure to vote!

It's not women's opinions that make the difference; it's women's opinions about men's opinions. If we had evidence that men liked us as much with some signs of age as they did when we were 21 and flawless, there wouldn't be a "beauty industry."

Man. I'm in a mood. Sorry, domjoe. Sorry, Dove.

Sorry f**king planet.

 

[ABSTRUSE]

Hi Sher.

 

[domjoe]

Re: Re: Those clever people at Dove...

f**king planet

If had to, it would be uranus.

 

[shereads]

Re: Re: Re: Those clever people at Dove...

If had to, it would be uranus.

You said uranus. Butthead.

 

[domjoe]

I aim high, I aim low, but I rarely miss the target..

 

[BlackShanglan]

On that one model ...

Dear lord. Definitely "outstanding."


Shanglan

 

[gauchecritic]

Hello Joe

A doctor once told my wife that the best thing with which to wash the skin was tap water.

When I saw the billboards I simply thought "at last."

The porn industry caught onto 'ordinary' women before I joined the internet. Advertising is simply catching up.