August 15, 2005

Real Women, Real Advertising

by Guy Brighton

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…

Article categories: Advertising & Branding

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4 Responses to “Real Women, Real Advertising”

  1. Henry Lambert
    Posted from: 62.173.113.136

    August 18th, 2005 at 7:13 am

    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

  2. Celeste
    Posted from: 24.126.118.13

    August 18th, 2005 at 8:33 pm

    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).

  3. Piers Fawkes
    Posted from: 69.142.79.51

    September 5th, 2005 at 1:35 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

  4. PSFK
    Posted from: 10.0.20.3

    September 15th, 2005 at 12:04 pm

    More Real People In Ads

    When will this all end and I can ride the subway to work in relaxation? There’s been enough spoken about the Dove Ads already and I always wondered whether the models Anheuser Busch used for their Bud Light subway posters were real people or just C lis…

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