For my first assigned blog post, I chose Topic #1: Advertising.
Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty:
The Real Beauty Sketches
Is beauty in
the eye of the beholder? If this is so, then perhaps some of the beholders are
blind, or viewing through a fun-house mirror, showing them a distorted version
of themselves. It is hard to find
someone these days who is not thoroughly inundated with the media and its
images. This is the age of the inferiority complex: On television, the
internet, and in movies and magazines we see celebrities who, in a lot of our
opinions, are the ideal epitome of human facial features, status and
physicality. They are fit, beautiful, healthy, and seemingly want for nothing.
It is then no wonder that a lot of people these days envy such celebs, and can’t
help comparing themselves to these “ideals”. Even the most attractive among us
harbors a kernel of insecurity that we aren’t as good-looking as we think they
are. There are not many top-drawer companies in the beauty industry who are
actively working on trying to get women to embrace, like, and accept who they
are, physically. One such company is Dove, the popular soap, shampoo and
conditioner manufacturer. No longer focused solely on making personal care
items; they now have a social mission. Let me take you down the rabbit hole.
The content of the newest one
of their ads, one of many of the campaign’s that I viewed, challenges our
perception of how we look compared to how a newly formed acquaintance describes
us. In this series of ads, called the “Real Beauty Sketches”, a forensic sketch
artist sits on one side of a suspended sheet, which is totally obscuring the
person sitting on the other side. The sketch artist then begins to draw the
person, based on the description that person is giving the artist of
themselves. After the artist has finished drawing the person (based only on
their own descriptions), the person leaves without getting to see the picture.
The artist then brings in another person, who is a total stranger to the first
person, and the stranger then describes the person to the sketch artist. In the
end, the first person now gets to view the two drawings. Needless to say, the
drawings are very dissimilar. The only text in the ads is the single sentence
at the end: You are more beautiful than you think. The music that plays in the
background is very unobtrusive, and it is set in a minor key; which is a trick
to get the viewers to respond in a deeper emotional way to the ad’s topic,
which is the low self-esteem a lot of women carry with them and why they; why we,
can’t see our own true beauty. The characters are seemingly normal people, like
someone you might see in your everyday life. You might pass them walking in the
street, or they could be a teller at your bank or a pastry chef at the bakery
you love. They seem to be very relatable, so obviously the ad is using the
plain-folks approach. The ad I viewed is six minutes and 36 seconds long, and
it was published on April 14th, 2013. It is part of a larger
campaign, a series of ads, which Dove has been running for many years. This ad
is simply one of the most recent, newest additions to the campaign’s box of
tools. As I said before, this ad uses the plain-folks approach, and I think it’s
obviously deliberate: the creators and designers of the ad are trying to drive
home the fact that all people (not just those who are famous, or are models, et
cetera) are beautiful even if they don’t think they are. This in turn makes us,
the viewers, believe that we too are beautiful, because aren’t we just regular
people as well, just like the women in that ad? I personally don’t think that
these ads use the association principle. The argument could be made that the advertising
legerdemain here is sub-rosa, but is still present in that the company who
created these ads wants you to associate using their products with being a
beautiful person. However, I would say that this argument is very faulty.
Nowhere in the ad does the company try to sell you its product, rather,
it is trying to sell you a product only you can create for yourself:
confidence.
I think the ad is very
different, in that Dove is the only company I’ve seen that is focused on trying
to get people to accept themselves how they are instead of trying to get people
to change because they aren’t good enough currently; or that they would be
better versions of themselves if only they used the products featured in the
ads the company is feeding them. It could be said that the target audience in
this particular ad is women, of all ages, sizes, ethnicities, et cetera;
because this ad is focusing on the perception the women have of themselves. But
I believe that the message the ad imparts applies to everyone, not just to women.
There aren’t any stereotypes in this ad, just people describing themselves
honestly. I don’t find the message of the ad offensive, and I can’t imagine
someone who would find it offensive. For the sake of time, I will narrow it
down and say that the ad’s main strength is that it’s addressing a real problem
that many people are facing every day; the way they feel about themselves. I
had a hard time trying to come up with any weakness the ad might have. They
aren’t discriminating against any race or body type in the women they used for the
ads. Maybe the ads are focusing too much on our appearance being the most
important thing (as in, if we don’t think we’re attractive then that somehow
makes us less of a good person, or less interesting or desired), but in today’s
society we are told that appearance and image pretty much are everything. So
the ads are really focusing on not trying to dissuade these people that
physical appearance is important, since that’s what they and the rest of us all
believe to some extent, but rather that they can and should accept their
appearance as it is instead of worrying that they aren’t good enough. The ads
here are memorable to me, because honestly, I struggle with self-esteem issues
as well, so I can connect with this issue. I watched most of these ads with my mother,
and we were both affected by the message they imparted. So I would have to
agree that they did in fact connect with their admittedly small target
audience.
Strangely enough, I found in
my background research that there are a select few groups who actually dislike
these ads, and label them as anti-feminist because, in their opinion, the ads
are propagating the message that women’s beauty is still the most important
thing about us, and that we shouldn’t try to accept that we are all attractive
or beautiful in one way or another. The critics of these ads go on to say that
instead, society should basically learn to value women based solely on the
positive values they have, excluding physical attractiveness; and that if
society could do that then perhaps women wouldn’t all have inferiority
complexes about their looks. There was also a blogger who complained that the
ads actually are discriminating against minorities, and focusing too much on
white people, because “people of color” only appear in the video for a small
amount of time; and that the two black women who gave their descriptions to the
sketch artist gave such “negative” comments as a round face shape and the fact
that freckles are appearing with age. This line of reasoning is redundant,
because the whole point of the ad is that everyone is describing
themselves with negative features and flaws, not just the “women of color”.
Based
on the ad, I wouldn’t go out and buy Dove products, but that’s because the ad
isn’t trying to convince me to buy their products. I would recommend that other
people view these ads. I have to say that this ad didn’t teach me anything I
didn’t already know, but that’s possibly because this isn’t the first series of
ads focusing on self-esteem that Dove has published. I’ve been watching these
ads of theirs since they first started making them.
Dove US YouTube Channel
Annie Blogs: Dove real beauty sketches
