Issue: Dove Accused of Retouching ‘Real Beauty’ Ads
Commentary by: David Vinjamuri

In Accidental Branding I write that brands need to ’sweat the details’ - meaning that paying attention to even small, innocuous details of the business that might not obviously affect the brand pays important dividends. A brewing scandal this week at Unilever with the Dove brand illustrates this. Dove has gotten into a mess because a profile of a professional photo retoucher in The New Yorker mentioned that he had worked on the ‘Real Beauty’ campaign - in which Dove explicitly argues against retouching reality. The details are complex, but Dove appears to have neglected to instruct a freelance photographer on the second iteration of the campaign in 2007 - the revered Annie Liebovitz - to avoid making any digital corrections to her photos.

The Dove Campaign for real beauty includes the following:

Original Print Campaign

Dove Pro-Age Print Campaign

Dove Evolution Video

Dove Onslaught Video

The campaign has been acclaimed for bringing body image issues to the fore. It has been criticized because Dove still sells products intended to beautify and because Unilever sells products like Axe that use the exact techniques that the Dove campaign criticizes.

Here are the facts in the unwinding mess:

Writing for the May 12th issue of The New Yorker, Lauren Collins profiled digital photo retouch artist Pascal Dangin. In her profile, Lauren writes:

To avoid such complaints, retouchers tend to practice semi-clandestinely. “It is known that everybody does it, but they protest,” Dangin said recently. “The people who complain about retouching are the first to say, ‘Get this thing off my arm.’ ” I mentioned the Dove ad campaign that proudly featured lumpier-than-usual “real women” in their undergarments. It turned out that it was a Dangin job. “Do you know how much retouching was on that?” he asked. “But it was great to do, a challenge, to keep everyone’s skin and faces showing the mileage but not looking unattractive.”

This paragraph was noted last week by BusinessWeek blogger Burt Helm on May 7th in his Brand New Day blog. Then Jack Neff from AdAge picked up the BusinessWeek story.

Unilever responded quickly, denying the accusations. Unilever’s PR department issued the following statement from the photo retoucher Pascal Dangin who was profiled in the article:

The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the [2005] Dove ‘real women’ ad. I only worked on the [2007 Dove Pro-Age] campaign taken by Annie Leibovitz and was directed only to remove dust and do color correction — both the integrity of the photographs and the women’s natural beauty were maintained.

Unilever also released the following statement from Annie Liebovitz:

Let’s be perfectly clear — Pascal does all kinds of work — but he is primarily a printer — and only does retouching when asked to. The idea for Dove was very clear at the beginning. There was to be NO retouching, and there was not.

The New Yorker responded by standing by its story - only noting that the word “undergarments” was misplaced - meaning that they agreed Dangin might not have worked on the first campaign.

From this muddle, it is not clear whether Dangin made substantial alterations to the Liebowitz photographs. What is clear however, is that he did touch them and at a minimum made the “color corrections” that he claims in the statement delivered through Unilever. So it seems clear that Unilever and the Dove brand did not explicitly ensure that the Liebovitz photos were completely unaltered. It seems possible that the photos met the standard set for the brand - not altering the appearance of the women - but any retouching of the photos leaves the whiff of impropriety. For the brand, this is a disaster which could have been avoided with more attention to detail.

Branding Bottom Line:
Dove gets mascara all over the brand

Brand: Dove
Execution: Cause Marketing Viral Video
Target: Mothers with young daughters
Rating: ****
Reviewer: David Vinjamuri

Description:
On this viral video launched in the U.K., a series of rapid images from the fashion and beauty press and the media assaults the viewer. Intercut with these stills, we also see a woman on a scale gaining and losing weight rapidly and repeatedly. The spot concludes with a shot of schoolgirls walking across a street and a message saying, “Talk to your doctor before the beauty industry does.” The branding is for the Dove self-esteem fund.

What Works:
In some ways, we like Onslaught - the evolution of the Campaign for Real Beauty - better than the original. By graphically showing us the effect of glamorized representations of beauty on young girls, Dove and the Campaign for Real Beauty get to the heart of the problem with the beauty industry today - that it is based on a rejection of one’s one body and an acceptance of unrealistic standards as the beauty ideal. The results are well-documented, from low self-esteem to anorexia and bulimia. This issue has gained momentum in the time since the original Campaign for Real Beauty was launched as fashion runways in Spain and other countries have banned models who are unhealthily thin.

Dove does a very good job of stepping back to the front of the line with the Onslaught viral video. This U.K. viral execution of Onslaught is most likely being used to test the waters for a larger global launch of the new campaign. It fits perfectly with the original branding strategy behind the Campaign for Real Beauty and will help Dove continue to solidify its hold on the moral center of the cultural debate over beauty standards.

What Doesn’t:
Dove may sadly underestimate the overall effect of this campaign on its business strategy and its brands. While the specific Dove brands which sponsor the campaign for real beauty may mirror its philosophy, Dove is still indisputably a beauty company. Many of the products the company makes fall into the category that the Campaign for Real Beauty is implicitly criticizing. They are not the worst offenders, but products meant to make you look younger, firmer or healthier all capitalize on low self-esteem and rest on dubious scientific ground. Dove should consider selling off lines which don’t meet the criteria for this campaign, and dedicating the company to products which fit the new brand promise.

Branding Bottom Line:
Brilliant campaign could save the brand and kill the company.

Here is our first take on the hits and misses of the game, by category:

CELEBRITY

Hit - Desperate Housewives (ABC) - Shaquille O’Neal, Hugh Hefner etc.
Instant Analysis - A nice job of using celebrity to show that absolutely everyone is watching Desperate Housewives. Turns celebrity on its head. ABC does a nice job of using its own time to build one of its own brands.

Hit - Debit MasterCard - MacGyver
Instant Analysis - We reviewed this spot before the game (click here to read review and watch video). It does a great job of bringing the God of Small Things - MacGyver - to the card for small things - Debit Mastercard. A good balance of big-game production value and solid marketing.

Miss - Pizza Hut Cheesy Bites - Jessica Simpson
Replace Carls and Paris Hilton with Pizza Hut and Jessica Simpson and you have this equally irrelevant spot which uses sex in a puzzling way. It not only fails to support the brand - it does not even make sense in context. Click Here to view.

HUMOR

Hit - Sprint Phones - Two spots do a nice job of showing the benefits of high speed phones with TV and downloads for Sprint. The first has the phone with the extra benefit of “Crime Deterrent.” The second is about the music and ends up with a Benny Hill romp around the room. What makes these work is that the humor connects to the product and the brand and the phone is very visible in both. Click Here to view.

Miss - AmeriQuest Mortgage - The ‘Don’t be too quick to judge’ spots are both very funny, but even professionals will have a hard time remembering the brand - which shows up only at the end of each spot. Click Here to view.

CAUSE MARKETING

Hit - Campaign for Real Beauty (Dove) - We have been critical of Dove using the Campaign to sell Dove Moisturizing lotion (click here) but for the Super Bowl Dove used its marketing dollars to promote the campaign instead. In the end, this will do more for Dove than the earlier spots. (Click Here to view)

Miss - The Beer Institute - The Beer Institute? Beer needs an industry group? It was nice to learn all of those foreign words for ‘cheers’ but with Budweiser spending nearly $20 million on the Super Bowl, nobody was going to forget Beer. (Click Here to view anyway.)

NEW PRODUCT INTRODUCTION

Hit - Hummer H3 (General Motors) - This is an older spot we have previously reviewed (click here) but one that worked well for the big game. Even though we would like more face time for the Hummer, this spot reinforces the ruggedness of the brand very well. (Click Here and turn of your pop-up blocker to view the spot).

Miss - Full Throttle (Coca-Cola) - This pre-game epic spot pulls out all the stops to convince you that you’ll be meaner and badder with Full Throttle Energy drink - including running a Red Bull car off the road. At the end we’re confused and Coke is a bit poorer.

Miss - Gillette Fusion (Procter & Gamble) - Not as bad as we had expected from the preview spot, but a flop nonetheless. Gillette does try to give us a plausible reason for adding two blades and draining our wallet further (more contact points equals less pressure equals less skin irritation) but it seems weak and irrelevant. We’re still more interested in real fusion - or maybe cold fusion. (Click Here to view - 2nd Quarter spot.)

OTHER NOTABLES

Hit - Budweiser Clydsdales (Anheuser-Busch) - Anheuser-Busch wasted a lot of money during the big game with spots that were all over, many of which were just forgettable beer commercials. This one, however, connected at an emotional level. Fortunately, the Clydsdales are so closely tied to Budweiser that there is no question which beer the spot is pushing. And the value of authenticity seems like it is Bud’s best brand proposition. (Click Here to view - 3rd Quarter)

Miss - Emerald Nuts - In the early 1990’s in Los Angeles, we learned that random success (like buying some beach property in L.A. in the 1970’s) makes people think they are geniuses. But sooner or later this random-ness fails. After spectacular luck last year with a quirky little spot, these random geniuses failed spectacularly. But perhaps the real nut fans will love it. (Click Here to view)

Commentary by: David
Issue: Best and Worst Campaigns of 2005 Named by WSJ

Susan Vranica and Brian Steinberg of the Wall Street Journal today named their picks for the best and worst advertising of 2005.

This Advertising Blog will announce the “ThirdWay Awards” - our picks for best spots and campaigns of 2005 as well as our choices for the year’s worst efforts on Monday, January 2^nd. In the meantime, however, we offer you a brief synopsis of the Wall Street Journal’s picks (read the original story here) along with our thoughts and links to our reviews of these spots.

The Best Advertising of 2005 –

1. Dove “Real Women” (Unilever)
• WSJ Rationale – Unilever broke new ground with this campaign which championed the cause of real women with real curves. The campaign created a public dialogue about our society’s sometimes unhealthy beauty ideal and generated a tremendous surge of media coverage for the ad.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ** (Click Here for our review)

While we agreed with the cause and applauded Unilever for supporting the Campaign for Real Beauty (the partner non-profit in these spots), we believed that Dove as a brand was not a good match for the real beauty message. Dove lotion is still a beauty product, intended to enhance a woman’s looks and ends up feeding the self-doubt the campaign seeks to end.

1. Target “New Yorker Issue” (Target Brands)
• WSJ Rationale – Buying out an entire issue of the New Yorker magazine and commissioning original artwork was “gutsy”, generating the kind of attention the retailer is looking for in a medium that has gotten short shrift from advertisers of late. Target showed how it and print can make a difference.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ***** (Click Here for our review)

With one masterstroke, Target sealed its ownership of “Design for All” – a bold step forward in its decade-long move away from Wal-Mart in the mass merchandiser retail sphere. In spite of these years of steady progress in bringing design to everyday life, Target seemed to arrive all at once last year and the New Yorker spread was the tipping point. Suddenly, Minneapolis and not Bentonville looks like the capital of the retailing world – as evidenced by the fact that Wal-Mart hired away a top marketer from Target and started running design-centric advertising (click here).

1. Budweiser “Superbowl Salute to the Troops” (Anheuser-Busch)
• WSJ Rationale – A smart turn to the right from the usually “sophomoric” Superbowl ads from the leading American beer-maker, this “poignant” spot featuring soldiers returning from overseas to spontaneous applause in an airport featured understated branding but a powerful message. Budweiser executes perfectly and scores a big win.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ****

We agree that this spot was perfectly executed. Anheuser-Busch precisely judged the mood of the country and was rewarded with generous press coverage and strong recall for the spot. This was a tactical move, no doubt, and doesn’t build the unique rationale for the brand but does connect to some of the core brand attributes for Budweiser. And most importantly it stood out against some of the cheesier executions in the all-important Superbowl ad war.

1. Nike “Tiger Woods Miracle Shot” (Nike)
• WSJ Rationale – When Tiger woods sunk an improbably chip shot and the ball hung for a second on the lip of the cup with the Nike swoosh featured prominently, it was a moment made for advertising. “With incidents like these, who needs to make actual ads?” says the Journal. They also applaud Wieden + Kennedy’s deft use of humor to set off the ad. The ad ran only briefly to avoid sounding too self-congratulatory.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ***

The actual event generated so much publicity for Nike that the ad seemed unnecessary and was very different in tone from Nike’s normal ad message. However the execution by Wieden is so spot-on that it is hard to argue with Nike’s decision to run the spot.

1. Audi A3 “Stolen A3” (Volkswagen AG)
• WSJ Rationale – Seamlessly using TV, Print, Billboards and even classified newspaper ads, Audi set up a mystery that led 500,000 consumers on a hunt to find the stole A3 which involved e-mail, IM, pagers and all manner of online and electronic clues. 500 A3’s sold in the first week of availability, in this high-profile test of viral marketing.

• ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating – ****

This campaign is a powerful argument for well-designed viral marketing. Volkswagen and McKinney + Silver orchestrated a seamless campaign that had huge awareness among the target audience and lots of targeted chatter, online and off. What surprised us most about the campaign was how invisible it was outside of the target audience. We did not really understand the extent of the cleverness here until we started adding up the media costs for the campaign and realized how much smaller the budget must have been than we would have guessed.

The Worst Advertising of 2005

1. Coke Zero “Chilltop” (Coca-Cola)

· WSJ Rationale – The spot was intended to launch Coke Zero but fell flat because it did not explain the product which confused consumers. It also left Coke open for a successful jab in an ad by Pepsi. The WSJ thinks the problem is that Coke pitches commercials at youth but tries to appeal to older people at the same time.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ** (Click Here for our review)
While two-thirds of the editors of this blog are former Coca-Cola marketers, we must agree that ‘Chilltop’ was a failure. And it will surprise many regular readers of this advertising blog that we do not blame the failure of this spot on Crispin Porter + Bogusky. Our belief is that what could have been an excellent execution for Coca-Cola classic was subverted by the Coke Zero launch. This ad was indeed confusing and in spite of Coke’s assertion that “strong year-to-date sales” for Coke Zero prove the ad worked we noticed that Coke quickly withdrew the spot and started running another campaign behind Coke Zero.

1. Domino’s “Apprentice Placement” (Domino’s Pizza)

· WSJ Rationale - a mismanaged product placement allowed Domino’s to be outflanked by rival Papa John’s. Domino’s promotes the meatball pizza on the show but advertises a cheeseburger pizza on associated spots. Papa John’s in the meantime is barred from buying network advertising on the same show but sneaks in by making local buys in 64 markets advertising a meatball pizza. At the end, Papa John’s stole the show from Domino’s.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - *

When product placements are heavy-handed and the monetary exchange is clearly the only rationale for the placement, they are ineffective. Domino’s managed to turn wasted money into lost revenue by mismanaging the execution and allowing Papa John’s to insert the “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza,” tagline they have litigated so hard for into the middle of Domino’s expensive product placement.

1. Carl’s Junior “Paris Hilton” (CKE Restaurants)

· WSJ Rationale – A terrible example of trying to cater to the “lowest-common-denominator” this spot was bad advertising and bad publicity as it stirred up a firestorm against Carl’s in spite of limited airing.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - *

This advertising blog avoided commenting on the ad and surrounding controversy on the off-chance that it is true that all publicity is good publicity for Carl’s.

1. Lincoln Mark LT Truck “Clergy Lust” (Ford Motor Company)

· WSJ Rationale – Ford made a bad decision in producing a spot featuring a clergyman lusting over a Lincoln truck after finding the keys in a collection plate (and subsequently returning the keys to the owners and writing a sermon with the heading “Lust”). The spot had to be pulled before the Superbowl and never ran despite Ford’s huge investment in production costs.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - ****

We agree with the WSJ that this spot was in poor taste and would not have been effective for Ford had it run. But Ford made the right decision in pulling the spot and did so quickly and without triggering a national scandal. While the advertising was not good, we believe that this was a good example of successful public relations. Anyone can make a mistake but to deal with it effectively is the sign of character.

1. US Department of Education “Planted Stories on No Child Left Behind” (US Government)

· WSJ Rationale – When the government hired Omnicom’s Ketchum group and they hired conservative commentator Armstrong Williams and he wrote favorable stories on No Child Left Behind he hurt his reputation, Omnicom’s and that of the Bush Administration.

· ThirdWay Advertising Blog Rating - *
This advertising blog believes that the real problem here is not that the government engaged in planting stories but that in doing so they were engaging in standard PR industry practice. We believe that many current PR practices are creating great risks for valuable brands and that the day of reckoning may be soon. But that is an issue for the new year.

Brand: Dove Nourishing Lotion
Execution: TV
Link: Click Here
Target: Real Women
Reviewer: David
Rating: **

Description:
The spot opens to a thin redhead in a white two-piece outfit that is somewhere between underwear and a bathing suit. The voiceover is a song:”What if we loved our skin … and put nourishment in…” As the spot proceeds we see visuals of very different women - pregnant, older, overweight, one with a tatoo and even a Caeserian scar. “Introducing Dove Nourishing Lotions with 24 hour neutraserum. The first line of body lotions by Dove.” The spot ends with a URL for the campaign for real beauty.

What Works:
Here’s what works

1. Engaging visuals - the white-on-white theme, interesting women and clean shots stand out.
2. Dove Takes a Risk - this is not normal advertising and these women are not normal models, so Dove is breaking the mold of beauty advertising.
3. Dove is standing for something meaningful to its consumers - with the campaign for real beauty, Dove along with Bath & Body Works and American Girl are trying to do something genuinely useful: change the self-perception of women against the cultural backdrop of perfection obsession.

What Doesn’t:
It is very difficult to take down a marketing company when they are trying to do something that is admirable and undeniably good with their advertising. The Campaign for Real Beauty is a an admirable idea, but it has been a disaster for Dove because it has diluted a brand positioning that was already wobbling under the weight of questionable line extensions.

Dove had a clear and unambiguous reason for being when they were about the woman’s face. Being gentle enough for a woman’s face gave them permission to be used for the rest of the body the same way that being gentle enough for a baby gave adults permission to use Johnson’s baby shampoo themselves thirty years ago. And just as Johnson’s erred in thinking that growing success outside of the baby market meant that they should move their advertising away from babies, so Dove has erred in becoming an all-purpose soft body line.

The Campaign for Real Beauty Ads, for soap, shampoo and now Dove Nourishing Lotion have taken this error a step further. In these spots, Dove is trying to substitute the brand positioning of the campaign (women come in all shape and sizes and that is great) for the brand positioning of Dove. And Dove is trying to morph into a generic empowerment message.

But it just doesn’t fit. First of all, Dove is confusing us. Soap with moisturing lotion gentle enough for a woman’s face so I can use it on my knees and elbows and feet - I get it. Now its for the whole body and the hair and my underarms and it’s really about me not being like everyone else? Huh?

Consumer are attracted to brands because they are experts at something. Dove is coming perilously close to being expert at nothing.

Here are three more problems with this spot:

1. Dove is Showing Different Bodies but Talking Different Skin - which is confusing to say the least. Watching this commercial without sound would lead you to think that it’s an underwear commercial. Now if Victoria’s Secret did this, it would be a real revolution. But Dove?
2. Dove is Afraid to Use Real Women - The talk is nice but look closely at this commercial and you’ll see that Dove has not really stepped out front and center and empowered ordinary women. They’re just showing models with a slightly wider range of ages and body types than the general commercial fair. They’re still much more attractive than the average pedestrian.
3. The Subliminal Message is Still “Improve Yourself” - This is where being a beauty product (nourishing lotion) really kills them. The message is that you need to add something that you don’t have to make you whole. And that means you aren’t whole already. This is why this would be a much better spot for a lingerie company or a jeans manufacturer (and wouldn’t it be nice for a mainstream clothing company to acknowledge real women?). This observation, by the way comes from Adam Finley at Adjab ( click here to read his commentary.)

So what looks like it could be a real winner is really a disaster for Dove. Will they be the next Ivory Soap, languishing in the bargain basement of branding?

Branding Bottom Line -
A noble idea falls for the wrong brand - with predictable results.