Friends With Candy » Good Causes http://www.friendswithcandy.com/blog good things for (sometimes) good people Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:33:00 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 Social Conscience, a bloody good brand http://www.friendswithcandy.com/blog/121/social-conscience-a-bloody-good-brand/ http://www.friendswithcandy.com/blog/121/social-conscience-a-bloody-good-brand/#comments Sat, 21 Oct 2006 08:55:25 +0000 Cathy http://www.friendswithcandy.com/blog/?p=121 This is a great video from Dove on our perceptions of beauty. At a time when even young children have growing rates of eating disorders, we should be looking at the responsibility that advertising and the media should take for the growing dissatisfaction in our physical self-perception much in the way advertising of obesity causing foods is now being criticised. It’s great to see an ad like this that highlights how the images that we are supposed to aspire to are often figments of illusion. Actresses get in body models, lenses are vaselined, cellulite is airbrushed out, legs are stretched, pimples disappear… but the end result perfect images are all presented as the norm and any deviations are faults. At the very least, there should be a disclaimer that a particular image has been Photoshop-ed*.

Though you have to remember, Dove is not a standalone company, it is housed by Unilever which includes brands like Lynx that feature impossibly good looking women who probably do get Photoshop-ed (but I do find their ads hilarious, even if it’s just the thought that a naff deoderant can suddenly make some guy irresistable). And Unilever, like most big companies, is far from squeaky clean. So it does make you think how much of it really is just their brand differentiation as opposed to any real desire for ethical good. Like with the amazing success of pink branding to help breast cancer fundraising, social conscience can be a very profitable brand. I did find it a little ironic that substances that research has suggested possible carcinogenic links like artificial pink strawberry fillings (Tim Tams) and PET packaging (bottled water) were included in the list of fundraising products. Back to Dove though, despite questions to their motives, it is great to see people of different weights, ages and looks being represented because there is so little variety in advertising and ads. Hopefully, this will make commercial sense and other companies will be tempted to try out “real” people as models.

*both photoshoped and photoshopped look really weird to me. Maybe it should be “Photoshop’ed”? Argghhhhhh!!!

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