Onslaught
I’ve watched and rewatched the newest video in Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, and each viewing leaves me with a sick pit in the bottom of my stomach and a slow, seething anger.
The video pulls on the emotional heartstrings and it does it well. We see a beautiful young girl, with so much life and potential and beauty. And then the onslaught begins. Hundreds of posters, magazine covers and billboards come flying at us, displaying unattainable body proportions in sexually objectified manners. Then come the promises. Become younger, slimmer, smaller, tighter, softer. Get the perfect skin. It really works. It really works. A timelapse view of a woman’s body through yo-yo dieting as the pounds come off and then fly back on and then shed away only to return. Pills. Salads. Gym memberships and more pills. Vomiting. Then rounds of assorted surgeries. Finally we return to the beautiful, young girl who has not yet been hit with the onslaught. Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.
Is it any wonder marketing is seen with such disdain?
For the sake of a few dollars more, we’re willing to take our daughters and fill them with fear and self-loathing. Then we turn them into tools to fill other girls with fear and self-loathing. You’re ugly. You’re hideous. No one can love you. Well - not as you are. But we may be able to help. Pick up our soap, it will give your skin the healthy shine you need to be beautiful. Your teeth aren’t white enough. You’re too pale - use our tanning lotion. You’re too dark - use our lightening lotion. Brush with our special tartar control, flouride enhanced, baking soda added and clinically improved formula. No. Not good enough. Use our bleach strips. That hair just won’t do. Use our shampoo. It will make you feel beautiful and that perceived value is justification enough to charge you twenty times what it’s actually worth. Don’t forget to use our conditioner, mousse, hair spary and gel. Don’t eat or you’ll be fat and no one will love you. Well actually, do eat. We can charge you twice as much for a half portion so long as we brand it with a popular diet.
I see the Dove ad and I know that little girl is going to be made to feel miserable and unloved and convinced that she is ugly, all for the sake of peddling a few more dollars worth of toiletries. I applaud Alison Leung, the marketing manager for Dove Canada and Tim Piper, art director at Ogilvy & Mather, for taking on this issue. They are doing good work with the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. The campaign has spawned the Dove Self-Esteem Fund which has, to date, reached over a million girls and young women, with a goal of reaching another four million by 2010 with a message combating the beauty myth.
But I think the campaign is also reaching an important juncture. The public conversation is beginning to turn cynical. Are these ads heartfelt in their execution, or is this just a manipulative marketing ploy to position Dove to a jaded public as being ‘on your side’. After all, Dove’s products are part and parcel of the beauty industry that’s being taken to task.
What’s more, Dove is a brand and the company behind that brand is Unilever. The Unilever web site promises “hair like Paris Hilton, Nicole Kidman or Posh Spice” with “the right products”. “Your face isn’t as firm and fresh as it used to be” warns the site. But don’t worry. Follow their facial excersise program and using Ponds facial cleanser will “firm up skin, leaving it soft, smooth and looking great.” And let’s not forget Unilever’s Axe body sprays and washes. Guaranteed to turn nice girls into hotty-totty nymphs unable to resist the advances of the man using Axe. As the site promises, “women can’t resist ANYONE wearing those great fragrances”.
Now, I’ve no doubt that Alison is sincere in her motives behind the campaign. If you listen to the interview she gives for the Career Joy podcast she is clearly using her position to act as an agent of change and a force for good. The campaign is making a difference.
But the conversation is beginning to focus more on the perceived hypocrisy than the message. You can avoid that conversation with statements that “Dove stands on its own” only so long and a do as we say, not as we do, position is tenable for only so long. When Dove began this campaign, it forced us to confront our own perceptions of beauty and answer some hard questions. Now, perhaps, it’s time for Dove to start answering some of the hard questions itself.
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October 5th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
So many products and services are advertised with young, gorgeous, semiclad women, to the point that I often feel I am quite an overlooked market. So I find it hard to fault Dove because its parent company does so too, or because it may have hard financial reasons for taking the stand it does. I applaud Dove for putting a different point of view out there. They will be swimming against the stream for a long time before the advertising industry changes, if it ever does. Until then, I am grateful I don’t have daughters.
October 17th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
It seems to me that the ad industry has managed to get many women to believe in a lie, which is that to be attractive, they have to be slim, youthful, made up and dressed in the latest fashions. In my experience, real men tend to be attracted to women just as they are, simply for being female! This is the truth that young women need to hear. Then they might be able to look at distorted ads for what they are — fantasy. Dove is to be applauded for boldly going in a new direction with their Real Beauty campaign.