Have you seen that Dove ad on TV? You know the company that makes soap and lotion and stuff, and they have an ad on TV with a website at the end – www.campaignforrealbeauty.com. I was pretty miffed because I visited there today and the first thing you have to do is select your country from a drop-down menu and surprise, surprise – no New Zealand. No Australia either. So what’s the point of putting the ad on television here? So we can go to their website and see how much we mean to their company?? Aaaaanyway. I chose the U.K. as my country and got taken to their website, which was ok but not revolutionary. There was a video there, though, which I quite liked. It is called Onslaught.
It’s a good message that I would be less suspicious of if it was put out by an organisation not trying to use it to sell their own products. But it is a good message. Something we all know to be true, but don’t want to admit in case it sounds like an excuse for not being what society seems to want us to be. Apparently the song used for the video is La Breeze by Simian. You can find other similar videos, like evolution, on YouTube. Incidentally, there is also a Singapore version for the ad that shows here.
Another video released online in April was put out by Greenpeace in response to the above video by Dove. The Greenpeace video is called Dove Onslaught(er) and shows the vast amount of damage being done to rainforests in Indonesia, largely to produce palm oil, used in Dove’s products.
The company who owns the Dove brand is Unilever, a gigantic company who also owns many other brands you’d probably recognise. Posted on the Greenpeace website:
Greenpeace’s forests campaigners were invited to meet with senior executives at Unilever headquarters on Friday 9 May 2008. In just two weeks the company had received tens of thousands of protest emails from around the world, seen Greenpeace activists bring hoards of news media to their buildings in the UK, Netherlands and Italy, and watched our viral video “Dove Onslaught(er)” take off faster than anything we’ve ever done before.
Cool. Two videos with two messages. Both make me feel happy – yay self-esteem, yay saving the environment; and sad – too little too late.
