vee

In a world where ads and communications are routinely passed over (3,000 ads a day, 90,000 ads a month on average and unpromptedly people will be able to only spit back 1.8 from the last month), Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty is such a clear breakthrough winner and I believe, unlike Jens, could be talked about 5 years from now as part of a wave of communication that elevated authenticity, tapped emotional, heartfelt value, perhaps even restoring our faith in ads to connect with people.

It's not only a winner but a true wake-up call to the marketing, advertising and pop culture community, on how we deliver ideas and ads with meaning.

Knowing some of the folks that delivered the genesis of this campaign in Canada, whether you believe their motives were insipid, cosmetic bashing and profit seeking or not (I believe their hearts were actually in the right place), they triggered an emotion in the average looking woman who lives in Windsor, Newark, Calgary, Queens or San Antonio "my value and attractiveness to the world counts whether I'm drop dead physically attractive or not."

If they believed the opposite, where would the successes of physically unassuming women like Madeline Albright, Mother Theresa, Kathy Bates (and I'm sure many others) be?

Grant, you're likely right, there are some real advantages culture allows us for fitting their role of beauty (and interesting how it shifts over as little as a century), but I believe the Dove campaign taps into a even more important self-view.

As we all know, what we perceive is what we believe – by questioning, changing and getting people to rally against a long-held viewpoint, this campaign gets my marks for the best one in the last few years anyway and doing enormous heavy lifting for a simple ad campaign in an era of consumer trust, attention and time shortfalls.

If its doing the wrong job of telling people that they can achieve things and be self-confident without fitting the majority's viewpoint on beauty, then maybe we as marketers should be asking for more ads that aren't right.

Some might argue that Dove are not complicit in this business, but I'd point out that it doesn't take a semiotician to deconstruct the Dove print/TV/Billboard ads which in S.E. Asia never use dark skinned South East Asian models, even though this is the predominant skin colour in the region. Instead Dove uses models that are ethnic Chinese (and thus whiter skinned) role models. Make no mistake that this contributes to the lower self esteem that the more rural and agrarian groups feel from this pernicious form of advertising. Some of us that have jumped through hoops to do responsible communications know all to well how effective this subtle racism really is.

Focus groups in these countries tell an even harder story. The ruling Chinese groups in places like Thailand, Philippines and Indonesia look down on darker skinned people to the extent that office workers will choose who they lunch with based on a hierarchical grading of whiteness of skin. That my friends is the uncomfortable truth of selling skin whitening cream or using only whiter Asian skinned models.

I'm aware that in Elizabethan times a tan was considered an indicator of toil in the fields and thus exposure to the sun and labour, and that this switched round when jet travel became cheap so that a tan was a badge of wealth to display tropical winter vacation status, but surely someone at Unilever could do the right thing and put a disclaimer on their skin bleaches that 'Unilever respects skin of all colours'? I know I tried to slip it in without success.

It's still not right but it's a start for all those girls from Isaan that struggle to make their skin white to fit into a cosmopolitan environment. It's notable that in so many S.E. Asian ad agency environments that produce homogeneous advertising, the local staff are invariably a homogeneous Chinese White.

Go figure!

Like you, I have always been fascinated by Elizabethan England. I too have wondered about why there was a literary flowering at this time and just afterwards. Because that society (and western society generally, until the late 18th century) favoured speech over text, I have wondered if the cause of the flowering was something that led people to speak to each other more often, or differently, or more intensely, than they had before. One such causal factor may have been the religious laws of Elizabeth's reign, in which both traditional Roman Catholics and new-fangled Puritans faced state-sponsored repression. I wondered if that led people to engage in more-intense private conversation and communications with people they could trust, with no desire or expectation that their words would be copied or published, or that their words would be properly understood by everyone who heard them. Thus, for example, Shakespeare's Sonnets, which are very private utterances, expressing intense love, mostly to another man, were intended for speaking aloud, and not apparently written for publication. Similarly, Shakespeare's plays appear to contain coded messages to England's Catholics, messages which non-Catholics in the audience may not have realized were there.

If talk could get you arrested (and worse — tortured, made impoverished and killed), then one may expend more than normal effort in deciding what, when, how and to whom to speak. Such efforts may lead speakers, naturally enough, to focus on clever word-play (as in Shakespeare's Sonnets), intense imagery (as in Marlowe's plays, or in Southwell's or Donne's poetry), and riveting rhetoric (Donne's sermons, Campion's and Garnet's pamphlets).

the whole thing is far too easy to decipher – and i think that is what ultimately bothers me about this campaign. – dove is playing the underdog with a humanitarian message. but everything is carefully balanced out so that everybody can get the message.

not bad for a mass-marketer…
but in the end it is just a fake – a credibility stunt that may not hold.

(some reactions to the 'controversial' new campaign – published by dove http://www.doveproage.com/ads_reaction.asp)

to me this campaign is just a counter statement in a cultural discourse – not the explanation of the world.

a little like toscani's campaign for benetton in the 90s. – not quite as good though.

This post and the responses to it has also got me thinking — in the days before mass media and great colour printing, how were ideals of beauty communicated?

I mean, a hundred and fifty years ago, unless you were posted to the fringes of Empire or lived in the New World, you'd likely never be exposed to "different" kinds of beauty. As a friend of pure-Irish extraction remarked on her first recent trip to the mother country, "It was so strange, everyone looked like a distant member of my family." Within a relatively homogenous local group, how do you decide who is "more" or "less" beautiful?

I've read some years ago that scientists studied attractiveness and boiled it down to a series of ratios — the size, shape and relative distance between elements on the face. For those of us not graced with it, we have artful cosmetics and surgery to bring us closer to that Platonic ideal.

Expressed as different variations on that set of ratios, one can argue that Cate Blanchett, Aishwariya Rai, Angelina Jolie and Penelope Cruz have more in common with each other — a possibly, very quantifiable "attractiveness factor" — than non-famous people who may still be attractive but are considered more "average" — no?