So earlier this week, a New Yorker story implied Dove had airbrushed its Campaign for Real Beauty ads -- a practice which the brand has long boasted it doesn’t do. Last night, after a full day of silence, parent company Unilever sent a statement sticking to its story. None of the photos featured in the Campaign for Real Beauty were "digitally altered," the statement said, and photo re-toucher Pascal Dangin did not work on the underwear ads, but on photos for Dove ProAge, like the one above.
Huh. To recap, here’s the relevant excerpt from The New Yorker’s May 12 profile:
“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.”
Here’s what Dangin is now saying, via a statement sent by a Dove spokesperson:
Mr. Dangin responded, “The recent article published by The New Yorker incorrectly implies that I retouched the images in connection with the Dove “real women” ad. I only worked on the Dove ProAge 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.”
Something ain’t right. I’ll keep digging to see what I can find out.
The full statement from Dove, with quotes from both Dangin and photographer Annie Liebovitz, is after the jump.
Much is being made of “The Wine Trials,” to be published this month by Fearless Critic Media, along with recent studies about consumer psychology that says we consumers are nothing but rubes and idiots when it comes to packaging and ads.
The controversy, as tackled this week by The New York Times Eric Asimov, surrounds how the Wine Trials book reports (and picked up Newsweek in its April 7 issue) that a $10 bottle of sparkling wine from Washington state outscored Dom Pérignon, which sells for $150 a bottle, while the El-Cheapo Charles Shaw California cabernet sauvignon, topped a $55 bottle of Napa Valley cabernet.
This from Asimov's article: "...In recent months American wine drinkers have taken their turn as pop culture’s punching bags. In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money."
"One of the studies was devised by Robin Goldstein, a food writer, to try to isolate consumers from outside influence so they could simply judge wine by what’s in the glass. He had 500 volunteers sample and rate 540 unidentified wines priced from $1.50 to $150 a bottle."
Here's my problem with all this discussion. Separating the image of a product from the product itself may be interesting in an academic way, but it is like trying to cut into the apple without breaking the skin.
Some of the same researchers who say those who spend $150.00 for a bottle of Dom instead of $10 the American stuff surely have brand preferences of their own. Aren't there brands that these researchers and writers "wouldn't be caught dead wearing or driving?"
It's good sport to point out that a confirmed Absolut vodka drinker can't tell their martini apart from one made with Popov in a blind taste (as a forthcoming story of mine will do).
The result of such research may be to get a few consumers to trade down in their wine purchases. But my guess is that the number will be few.
People buy the brands they do because they make them feel good. Sometimes it is for taste or efficacy too. I hate Bud Lite. I buy more expensive beer, because I like it better. It's usually small batch beer from small breweries. But I also buy Guinness. One of the reasons I buy Guinness is that it reaffirms my Irish heritage. If I were to choose a Michigan stout over Guinness in a blind taste, I still wouldn't buy the Michigan brew, because it doesn't stroke my Irishness.
Remember the first ads for Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty, when it flaunted its defiance of the beauty and fashion industries with images of love-handled and cellulite-prone “real” women? Turns out those photos, according to the May 12, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, were as digitally manipulated as any skinny model-festooned fashion spread. It’s mentioned in a Lauren Collins profile of the toucher-upper himself, Pascal Dangin, who works regularly for Vogue, Dior, Balenciaga, and many others. Hear what Dangin has to say about the Dove project on page 100:
“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.”
I’d say it’s ironic –and others might call it completely hypocritical of Dove and its ad agency, Ogilvy & Mather - that these women were so “touched up,” given Dove and Ogilvy's righteous noise about the practice in their enormously popular viral video, “Dove Evolution,” which you can watch below:
I'm curious to know what Dove and Ogilvy have to say about it. I'll let you know when I hear back.
The front page of today's New York Post shows that a brand that completely understands its customers can knock the ball out of the park almost effortlessly. The brand I'm talking about is, of course, The New York Post.
The full story, "Lohan a Highjacketer," does everything a perfect New York Post story should. You can find it right here.
Over at Seth's Blog, Seth Godin gripes about a Tumi ad, pictured, that never explains why more luggage equals more trees, or acknowledges that manufacturing luggage likely cancels out the trees’ contribution to the environment. He writes:
“The easiest marketing promise to make is to say you'll do something green if people consume what you sell. That you'll support one green cause or another. No one is in charge of checking out your story, and my guess is that 90% of the time, it leads to a net negative--more landfill, more carbon, more waste.”
So I put in a call to Tumi. Why does buying Alpha Collection luggage “Help Plant 100,000 Trees”? The short answer: It doesn’t. Tumi donated $100,000 to a non-profit, American Forrest, which plants a tree for every $1 donated, a little while ago. There’s no link to current suitcase sales.
In all fairness, I’m glad Tumi is supporting the environment. Beyond this American Forrest donation, later this summer it also plans to donate 20% of the proceeds from a forthcoming messenger bag to Bicycle for a Day, actor Mathew Modine’s non-profit company.
But this “Go Green, Get Green” claim is cheap and misleading. Yes, one could -- and a company representative did -- argue that if no one bought anything from Tumi, the company couldn’t make donations like these. Um, OK. But designing a whole promotion around that tenuous truth and slapping it on the front page of the company website is exceedingly tacky.
As consumers grow more skeptical of environmental tie-ins, marketers will have to step it up. Godin, over on his blog, has suggestions. In my opinion, cashing in on Green means eschewing the one-day sale in favor of Patagonia or Method’s method - hewing day-in, day-out to a green brand promise.
Meanwhile, there's another group of companies that could soon find itself in the hot seat over carbon emissions. That group includes Google. (Searchblog)
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