"Every body is beautiful"

I’m going to put it out there, I love my new shower crayons. They allow me to jot down ideas in the shower which tends to be when I think most creatively. I’ve found my daily hygiene routine has been greatly improved by this novel form of mind mapping. 

Last night my focus was on the Dove products that frequently adorn my bathroom shelf. Being interested in advertising always makes me wonder what influenced me to buy the products in the first place. I started by writing down words I associate with the brand: clean, honest, pure, empowering..etc. I had underlined the word empowering because this is the word that encompasses the Dove campaign as a whole. The adverts are always striking in their simplicity and use of women who are easy for the every day women to relate to. Their “pro age” range highlights their ethos which encourages “women to say goodbye to ads about muffin tops and belly bulges, and hello to positive beauty messaging” (Fernando Machado, Global Vice President, DOVE). There is a real feeling that Dove understands what women want (sorry to use the cliche there), they are not telling women to change but are instead encouraging them to embrace and enhance what they already have.

It is unsurprising that Ogilvy and Mather won A Bronze in Cyber Lions and Silver in PR at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity for their work with DOVE. Their ad campaign extended to Facebook where users could post positive messages such as “Be your beautiful self” and “Beauty is an all-ages show”. The triumph in this advertising scheme was it’s subtlety, the only reference to DOVE was the iconic logo of a gold Dove beside the users chosen uplifting phrase. Using the sphere of Facebook is not new to advertising (I swear, one more PPI pop up and I will not be accountable for my actions), but what made Ogilvy and Mather’s campaign so successful was that it empowered the consumer to take hold of advertising in a way which was personal to them. The best advertising is word of mouth, and the created Facebook app allowed this to be done on a global level from profile to profile, person to person. 

  

Ogilvy and Mather are a remarkably forward thinking company whose campaigns I always look forward to seeing because they seem to find the simple niches that nobody else has seen. As the original mad man said himself, “Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things” (David Ogilvy), in the case of DOVE it is genuinely refreshing to see advertising working on human strengths rather than weaknesses. The uplifting adverts, the creative Facebook app and the simply packaged products make for an undeniably strong campaign as a whole.      

A highly productive shower indeed. 

"A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step"

According to the Oxford English Dictionary the definition of pursuit is “often associated with movement, particularly that in a competitive journey”. Essentially, this is what I see my future in advertising to be: entirely challenging, probably fraught with setbacks and struggles but hopefully moving in a forward direction. 

Truthfully, the path of advertising is one that I have only recently started to walk. After years of preparation for a career in a law, I awkwardly realised that I actually have no interest in it (apart from abiding by it I should swiftly point out for concerned readers). I’m much happier reading Marketing weekly than I am the knitty gritty parts of employment law. So much to my parents dismay (you can probably hear my mother’s sobs of disappointment as she packs away the barrister’s robes and judge’s gavel) this is the road I have chosen to tread. I’m not expecting anyone to give me a lift to my destination but if anyone has any wise words or directions along the way it would be much appreciated.