Dove started the trend with creating a campagin targetting "real" women. Depiciting pictures of not-model-like women, Dove challenged the notion of beauty. Following the same notion, women with "Big butts, thunder thighs and tomboy knees" feature in Nike’s newest advertising campaign.
This Ad-age article points out that advertising campaigns such as these could mark the shift of how women are portrayed in media and advertising.
An interesting trend to watch out for…
Facebook
Twitter
Digg
Reddit
StumbleUpon
An odd thing happened at Ogilvy and Mather’s Chicago office this spring. An emotional father called the ad agency’s managing partner, Debora Boyda, thanking her for creating the Dove soap campaign that features decidedly ordinary-looking women in their underwear. Not skinny, beautiful models here. Just randomly selected women who tout their use of Dove soap.
The man’s teenage daughter had just recovered from a four-year battle with anorexia and the grateful father wanted to stress how important he thought it was for ads to give the world other ideals of beauty rather than a size-2 blonde with high cheekbones. “That to me was the high point of what the ad achieved,” says Boyda, who was part of the team at Ogilvy that created the ad.
More at http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/aug2005/nf20050817_5273_db035.htm
August 18th, 2005 at 7:13 am
But the current Dove “real women” campaign (the one with all the girls in white underwear) really undercuts its supposed message since the ads are for firming cream. So they’re really telling women that they need to spend money on this special flab-fighting cream and smear it all over their bodies in order to be beautiful (such firming creams, anti-cellulite creams, etc. are notorious for not working, though I haven’t tried Dove’s so you never know).
August 18th, 2005 at 8:33 pm
The NY Times have followed up this : http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/magazine/04CONSUMED.html&OP=5ba52299Q2FQ3EQ5CyQ5BQ3EQ7E4-.Q7C443AQ3EAQ3BQ3BQ2AQ3EQ3BHQ3EQ3BpQ3EtiWinSQ27yQ3EQ3BpQ3DoUwIs)Q3FmY3tg
September 5th, 2005 at 1:35 pm