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.
Although this is very funny, I do agree with some of the comments that a photo straight off the camera could already be manipulated. I do touch ups sometimes to get rid of airplanes and other unwanted things on photos I’m planning to print.
Hard to take Unilever seriously with all this real beauty stuff when they make and market Axe, which reduces women into brainless pieces of meat.
It’s a clever little ad, I suspect it’s just making a point rather than trying to convert retouchers. That said, you got to wonder about the integrity of the message when the same company also sells products using messages like this … http://youtu.be/S-uVc13oDBI
Very well executed and doesn’t make it look difficult.
The ad’s “cleverness” is only eclipsed by its self-serving preachiness.
Yeah, Dove ought to boycott those terrible art directors and graphic designers who are going behind their backs and making the models Dove hires look better than they do. Doves next video will show a hidden camera of art directors and photohop “professionals” chortling after Doves “square” product managers leave the meetings, like an episode of “Mad Men”. It all goes to show what happens when hapless Canadian businessmen who just want to sell n innocent bar of soap to housewives,make a trip to the “big city” and get taken by those city slickers in their black frame glasses. If they just hired their countrymen they could show “real beauty” like on the Red Green show. Eh?