Italy
October 26, 2012
General Manager
Dove Consumer Care UK
Unilever UK
Freepost
Admail 1000
London
SW1A 2XX
Dear Manager,
I am writing to you in order to thank you for creating advertisements in order to show what real beauty is. My favorite advertisement of your “Dove Campaign for real beauty” was “Evolution”. I think it is very effective the way you showed how the media manages to make a model look unrealistically better than she actually is. I am a teenager myself and beauty advertisements affect all my peers and me. I have seen many girls that have such a low self-esteem because of the advertisements that include “perfect” women. Most of my girl friends and I have chosen pictures from the internet that are of beautiful, skinny girls and we put them on our phone backgrounds and our refrigerators in order to remind us that we have to look like that. In order to prove my point I looked at statistics that show the effect media has on body image. Teen people magazine conducted a survey and found that 27% of girls felt like the media pressures them into having an ideal body. 69% of the girls said that magazine models influence their idea of a perfect body shape. I know that the women in the advertisements are not as “perfect” in real life; they become ideal with the help of Photoshop and other features. Even though many girls know this, they still attempt to look like the models in the advertisements. Photoshop is becoming a fundamental requirement for photos. Farid, a professor of computer studies at Dartmouth College that studied retouching said “On women I most often see wrinkles erased, skin smoothed, body far trimmed, and boobs made bigger and more gravity- defying”. Girls like myself might not realize how much editing is done to a photo before it is published and I believe your advertisement “Evolution” manages to give us an idea of how the media manages to manipulate our perception of beauty. I am also thankful to you for choosing the advertising company “Ogilvy & Mather” for bringing your thoughts into reality. I believe that it’s a very strong advertising company and it manages to bring the customers requirements into reality, I have read that “Ogilvy & Mather” has done other “Real Beauty” advertisements for you and other advertisements against smoking, anti homophobia and other types of advertisements, therefore I believe they are experienced in the “anti ads”. One of their slogans is “Never run an advertisement you would not want your own family to see”. I think it’s a very strong statement, and the “Evolution” advertisement proved their point. The love that people have for their family could be different than any other love and it is very important to protect your family. I believe this advertisement is very efficient in displaying the interests of your campaign for real beauty and managed to portray the goals of “Ogilvy & Mather as well. It portrays the goal of the “Dove Campaign for real beauty” by displaying common beauty. It also managed to raise awareness of how unrealistic the perceptions of beauty are created. The media creates these perceptions; they create these perceptions through the use of images and words. Images include extremely skinny models and words such as “beauty” and perfection” These words stand out to the audience, and make the audience believe that they have to look like models in order to look “perfect”The study that you conducted “The Real Truth About Beauty”. The study proved that the definition of beauty became limiting and unachievable. I saw that at the moment the advertisement was uploaded it had 40,000 views the first day, 1,700,000 within the first month and about 12,000,000 views within the first year. So it is safe for me to say that it is a successful advertisement. I believe “evolution” is a very successful advertisement and can help many women realize the way the media distorts our perception of beauty and could stop many us from trying to achieve these high standards.
Connie Morrison the author of “Who Do They Think They Are? Teenage Girls& Their Avatars in Spaces of Social Online Communication” says that “Girls understand that the images on television and in magazines are manipulated, and for some this understanding seems to lead to an expectation that they can be doing the same” Connie Morrison interviewed a girl and she said that “It makes me more comfortable when my profile picture is something that looks flawless and pretty even though I know its fake” Even though many teenage girls know that many of the advertisements are photoshopped and the beauty image that is portrayed in advertisements are unreachable. I think girls don’t realize how much editing is being done to a photo before it is published. Girls might think that brightness/contrast, colors, and the definition of photos are adjusted. The Vermont department on health analyzed your add and looked through the changes that were made to the model and these are the examples that they stated “artificial lighting, makeup applied, blemishes covered, hair curled and styled, artificial wind blown hair effect, hair color was changed to be more reddish and highlighted, eyes enlarged, neck sculpted, eyebrows shaped, hair made to look fuller, forehead and face slimmed and lips enlarged” I believe your add did a wonderful job to show how much work is put into an advertisement before it is published. The model that was in your advertisement changed incredibly from the moment she walked into the photo-shoot to the moment that her face was on a billboard. Girls don’t recognize the changes until they see the whole process, and your “Evolution” advertisement managed to show the way media distorts the perception of beauty in a very clear and effective way. The “Evolution” advertisement managed to boost my self- esteem and made me realize that the standards in the advertisement are unreachable even for the models themselves.
Thank you.
by
highondope (student)
