Dove has had this Real Beauty campaign going on for a few years now. They found a real niche with their billboards featuring these bodacious babes with their REAL afros and their REAL asses and REAL attitude and all that. It reads a little like the Spice Girls "Girl Power!" anthem minus the vanilla underwear. The Spice Girls would have blinged out underwear. However, as this blogger notes, the ads looked a little different in Hong Kong. Oh well, they're a homogeneous society, so I guess they can make excuses. Still, with the long hair and the skinny body types, clearly they missed the point of the campaign.
Or did they? Dove is betting it's corporate image on this Real Beauty schtick. Women applaud that, but at the end of the day, we'd much rather look like Eva Longoria, or fool ourselves into buying products that make us think we're closer to looking like Eva Longoria. A quick look at Dove's website shows it's eventual compromise: healthy looking women, the occasional torso tattoo, but above all, no real eyesores. Big points for Dove if they ever sign on Ugly Betty.
Also, I realize I'm like an entire year late catching up on this whole campaign in the first place, which is like ten years in cyberspace. I guess the rock I've been living under was pretty big.
