After watching Dove’s new Ogilvy-created commercial, Onslaught, a follow up to Evolution, you might become a bit sickened you work in an industry that forces impossible ideals down the throats of innocent children. Now if you think that’s overstating things a bit, just watch the new commercial. You know it’s true. You know there are far too may “bigger, better, more beautiful, clearer, slimmer, fuller, trimmer” ads out there incessantly bombarding people with messages that basically say you’re too fat, ugly, flat, dowdy, slobby for your own good and you simply must rush out and buy product after product after product that promise to turn you into a super model but will do nothing but drain your purse.
Called Onslaught, the commercial lives up to its name by illustrating what young girls see in the advertising we create. While we, as adults, may love to see images of beautiful people, we, as adults, know those images are unrealistic, unrepresentative and have likely, as Evolution illustrated, been heavily manipulated from their original state. Most young kids don’t now know this…unless their parents tell them which it’s exactly the message Onslaught delivers. Its powerful. Watch it and then think about it.
And yea, yea, yea. One could look at this as entirely hypocritical. After all, Dove sells some of the very products and notions it slams in this commercial. But we don’t see it that way. It’s sort of like sex. At some point, everyone’s going to do it. They just better be well educated about every positive and negative thing that goes along with it.
