The most well known ad in the U.S. from the Dove Real Beauty Campaign.
Hello all! I am back and I am ready to share with you the wonderful opportunity I had to listen to Maureen Shirreff, the North American Creative Director for the Dove Real Beauty campaign, and Group Creative Director for Ogilvy & Mather in Chicago at Dr. Carolyn Bronstein’s graduate seminar, Critical Perspectives on Public Relations and Advertising at DePaul University, on 10/10/09. Shirreff is considered to be one of the top creative directors in the U.S. I have to admit after listening to her I ended up buying Dove Exfoliating Facial Wash while in Target later that afternoon and I am still not sure if it was because the advertising is just that good or because her persuasive personality made me fall in love with the Dove brand. Shirreff is incredibly knowledgeable, humble and nothing like your stereotypical advertising executive.
In a clean cut Powerpoint signed with Ogilvy & Mather’s insignia she explained the process she and her team went through to create the Dove Real Beauty campaign. The process starts out the way advertising 101 explains it: by studying the Dove brand and what it represents and conducting research. Shirreff and her team were very proactive getting 18 Ogilvy & Mather’s offices involved. They surveyed 3,200 woman from ten different countries. They discovered that only 2% of the women surveyed described themselves as beautiful.*^ The research pretty much put women’s low self-esteem into numbers and percentages and became the basis of the advertising campaign that would change the definition and begin a discussion of what is real beauty.
What I found most interesting is that the most provocative advertising wasn’t done in the U.S. because of how our culture reacts to shock media. The most provocative ads were in Europe. Their most effective form of advertising is the website they created and the video “Evolution.”
The most well known advertising is the “True Colors” commercial that ran during the 2006 Super Bowl. Shirreff, to my own surprise, explained that the ad touched many fathers who were unaware of the pressures and low self-esteem their daughters may be suffering.
I know it may seem like I am blabbing, but I feel that this campaign truly is effective and it helps society. While most beauty advertisements make me never want to eat again or convince me I need to change everything about myself to be pretty, the Dove Real Beauty campaign actually makes me respect myself. The campaign gives women what they have been looking for their whole life: assurance. Assurance that it is okay to be different, it’s okay to be you.
How do you feel beauty advertisements portray women? Should they be held responsible for the negative effect they have on society, especially teenage girls?
*The definition of beauty according to Merriam-Webster: “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit: loveliness.”
^That 2% of women were from Latin America, which is the second to the U.S. in plastic surgery.
