Dove has been running “Real Beauty” ads for more than a decade. Their agency Ogilvy in Toronto cam up with a pretty dope hack/secret weapon to raise awareness with photo re-touchers, art directions and designers to reconsider the messaging that they and their clients are promoting by thinning, coloring and generally adding or subtracting to women’s bodies for benefit of advertising to the masses.
By disguising a desirable Photoshop action in popular blogs Dove has seeded it in a way that folks will download it for their work. What appears to be a skin “glow” or brightening action actually reverses all previous manipulations and reverts images back to their original state and posts a layer of messaging about why they’re doing this. Clever hack for their cause.
She looks SOOOOO so much better with curves anyway.
As a retoucher I find this fairly insulting and duplicitous. I’m not skinni-fying women for my own kicks – I’m doing what a Client asks. The Client is responding to focus groups made of regular folks. Ultimately this is just a ploy from a marketer aimed at consumers, placing blame on the wrong parties with the message “look how terrible marketers are.” Can Dove really say they only use images straight out-of-camera? No. This isn’t clever and it’s certainly not honest.
I agree, whoever did this thinks they are some kind of hero, but they are targeting the wrong people. It isn’t the workers who do this to society, it is the owners/capitalists. They are the ones responsible for constructing false ideas of beauty in our minds to sell us something. Also: I don’t like the thought that many unsuspecting people were a target of this stupid ploy to change our perception of beauty. You cannot even justify it by saying you are enlightening people. If you are trying to raise awareness to this prejudice, you need to target young people, that is where they plant their seed. I don’t know about you but when I was a kid I wasn’t looking for ‘skin glow’ actions for photoshop…
Give us a Break – Those Evil Owners & Capitalists…
So the fact that YOU choose to accept those Owners & Capitalists checks as just a “worker” excuses you of any association? You are just following Orders?
Its up to you “workers” if you decide to take a job. And if you choose to accept a Job that has end results that you do not agree with – then don’t pass the blame onto those who hired you – those Evil Owners & Capitalists.
Those Evil Owners & Capitalists also make your Computers and IPhone’s.
@Joet
You are just another ignorant liberal jerk that doesn’t understand capitalism and the benefit’s you lame liberals enjoy every day …including the instrument used to post your ridiculous message. Please take your liberal friends and move to some socialist country and quit ruining the great countries that have flourished due to capitalism
Coming from the company that sells skin whitening products in india… Dove isn’t doing it because they care, they’re appealing to the modern north american woman so they buy their shit. If only their intentions were pure…
It doesn’t matter what their intentions are, they are running a very valuable campaign.
YEAH!
Yeah, this will really teach those hobby photographers and amateur retouchers a thing or two.