TMI from Dove
Posted: Tuesday, October 23, 2007 3:00 AM by Rob Neill
Filed Under:
Beauty products, Health care
Dove’s “Campaign For Real Beauty” has been the source of good advertising with a good (if a tad bit Oprah-ized) message for a few years now.
The message: Women should be comfortable with their bodies and own beauty. Hopefully it has made some people feel better, more respected and respectful.
Certainly, though, women are still hit with contrary messages at every turn. The company’s new “short film” (or is that “long ad?”) is especially striking.
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| Unilever |
“Onslaught,” created by the campaign by agency Ogilvy & Mather opens with a doe-eyed young girl staring into the camera, as if she’s waiting to be told something. What follows is about 50 seconds of rapid-fire edits and dissolves that show what the world, or at least the world of advertising, will be telling her throughout her life. And how she may live her life because of it.
Advertisements for lingerie dissolve into fashion magazines dissolve into diet pills dissolve into beauty creams dissolve into an emaciated woman piling on weight and back again dissolve to a bulimia sufferer dissolve into various plastic surgeries.
When the commotion dies down, the camera refocuses on the girl with the message “talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”
Show the evidence. Deliver a simple message. Very effective.
Of course Dove is owned by Unilever, which makes the really-it’s-a-magic-pheromone-and-not-cheap-drugstore-cologne spray Axe. And more importantly markets it like this. We’re far too polite to at this point bring up talking out of both sides of one’s mouth. So we won’t.
Apropos of nothing: We really liked this completely unrelated ad. Reminds us of when Tarantino made good movies.
