Tori Civically Engaged

Dove Disappoints

Racism and skin care shouldn’t be colliding subjects. In a perfect world racism wouldn’t be a subject at all, but when a three second skin care commercial becomes a huge social debate about modern day racism, you know there is a problem.

The advertisement shown is from October of 2017 and shows four images from the 3 second dove commercial that aired on Facebook. The clip begins with an African-American woman wearing a nude shirt who takes off her shirt and a white woman is revealed below. This change in subject seems to show that by using the dove product the first woman is literally “white-washing” herself, as though clean skin has something to do with skin color. Of course, the ad was quickly met with controversy and Dove dropped the ad and issued an apology. Yet it still leads us, the ads audience, to question: what were they thinking?

The campaign was meant to be celebrating women of different skin tones, if you can believe it. The original ad was meant to show that all skin deserves gentleness – in other words -Dove products. Seven different women were represented in the original 30 second TV commercial, each describing what their skins’ wash label would be, and each of the models have claimed to be proud of being a part of such a culturally positive advertisement. Yet with a number of digital cuts this culturally positive ad was cut down into a three second clip that had its audience completely turned against it. The editors couldn’t see past their snipping tools to view the negative connotations that followed their work.

And more than just the viewers were upset about how the ad was perceived. Lola Ogunyemi, the black woman represented in the advertisement, was ashamed of how the project was shown by the marketing team. She still believes that the ad design was a positive one with good beginnings but that it was shown to the audience in a way that twisted the original meaning. Lola declares in an article she published in The Guardian in response to the ad, “I am not just some silent victim of a mistaken beauty campaign. I am strong, I am beautiful, and I will not be erased.”

Lola’s Full Response

Yet,most haven’t heard Lola’s side of the story and possibly sadder still, is that the vast majority of the audience likely saw nothing out of the ordinary when they viewed the Dove ad. Millions of users who were scrolling through Facebook saw a black girl be transformed by a skin moisturizer into a white girl and had their subconscious racism reaffirmed in their minds without fully processing what they were viewing. Our nation’s history has fostered such a strong stage for negative discourse about races that advertisements such as these simply embed in our minds these racial notions of valuing certain skin tones, and the people that are behind them, as lesser. These concepts of racism too often pass in front of our eyes without our minds being able to fully digest them and pull apart the negative impact that they are having on our subconscious classification of people. As American citizens we have a responsibility to understand what we are being fed by the media and be conscious of how we are perceiving and accepting that information.

For a Better Understanding of Unconscious Biases in the Modern Age

Further, those behind the media and those feeding the public opinion must take greater care to analyze their own rhetoric that they are putting before the masses. These sort of racial situations appear far too often in the public sphere.

Other Racial Ads and the Companies Responsible

The Dove Advertising Team must have reviewed that ad and how they cut it numerous times without considering the negative connotation it had; how? Did they not have minority members who would consider that aspect? Where they too focused on the editing process or overall concept that they missed the audience’s viewpoint? Where did they go wrong?

But really, how did they try to make it right? Dove’s response to this ad slip up hardly claimed the ethical level of responsibility that they should have: they dropped the ad and they tweeted. A tweet. An apology via twitter!

They “deeply regret the offense it caused” enough to use 23 words on twitter to apologize.

And this would be another matter all together if this wasn’t the first time the Dove advertising team messed up in such a way. Yet in 2011 the company released a similar misconceived ad in which three women of different skin tones seemed to have healthier skin that corresponded to their tones.

This ad slip up not only negatively affected the models and people who viewed it but the Dove Company themselves as people responded negatively towards them and even more detrimental, their ethos as a beauty company was destroyed to all those who were aware of this advertising mess. Dove has a beauty campaign known as “Real Beauty,” yet now after they seemed to claim that real beauty is based on skin tone in their advertisement their market cannot truly respect or hold what they say as valid.

Media sources and public influencers have a duty to meticulously comb their messages before putting them before the world, given these examples, Dove has failed at their combing.

05. September 2018 by vyl5031
Categories: Uncategorized | 1 comment