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"Real beauty" from the makers of Axe?
It's been a while since we checked in on the Dove "Real Beauty" campaign, but I would feel remiss in not pointing out the new round of criticism its getting.
If you haven't seen them, the Dove commercials are as genius as they are insidious (see Onslaught and Evolution, for instance). As the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood pointed out last month, Dove is owned by Unilever, which also produces Axe body spray and other personal hygiene products. So while the makers of Dove attack advertising that exploits female bodies, they're producing scores of those ads at the very same time. The Axe campaign, however, is particularly obnoxious. As media literacy consultant Bob McCannon has said:
In all my years of doing school workshops, I have never seen anything like the reaction of middle and high school kids. Almost ALL (no exaggeration) know the words to the Axe song, "Bom Chicka Wah Wah," by heart and sing it immediately and enthusiastically with the video, and most of them have been to the Axe "spanking vixens" site.
Now someone has re-edited Dove's latest commercial—replacing bikini bunnies from generic sources with those from Axe commercials—to call attention to Unilever's hypocrisy. See A Message from Unilever. With luck, word will get around to all of those middle and high school teachers using the Dove spots as media literacy. The real lesson here is not that Dove supports "real beauty" but that corporations will say anything—even ostensibly critical things—to sell their crap.
Posted by carrie on 12/10/2007 | Permalink
Comments
When I saw the Axe commercials I was mostly just amazed by the whole 'Bom Chicka Wah Wah' tagline... is it borderline racist? Or just bad appropriation? Either way it's kind of embarrassing.
Going back to the point of this entry - big corporations long ago got to the point where they defy being thought of as a single entity. There's no connection between what they produce other than the money behind it. Two products can easily have entirely different teams working on them.
I was talking to a friend recently about the games publisher Electronics Arts. They've been responsible for ruining the good work of game developers many times... however, judging a feature release against this history would be foolish because there easily could be none of the same people invovled.
Posted by: Felix | Dec 11, 2007 10:19:44 AM
What pisses me off that they stole my thing. For years when I was pretending to be overly sexy, I would sing, "BOMB CHICA BOMB-BOMB," as I walked with an excessive hip-shake to accentuate my round booty. It was my way of trying to beatbox background porno music to increase the retardedness of how I was acting (sometimes it's fun to act like a dufus). My friends always found it pretty entertaining.
Axe stole it and now when I do it not only do people think that I am referencing some *ridiculous* (understatement) television commercial, but they think that I am singing it incorrectly.
DIE AXE, DIE!
Posted by: Jill | Feb 5, 2008 8:19:37 PM
