Advertising Age spotlighted a new performative promotion from the Dove Real Beauty campaign—a video titled, “The Code.”
Now the Unilever brand is pledging to never use AI in its advertising. Given the surging interest in AI, the stunt seems like an opportunistic declaration—and unnecessarily redundant, as the self-absorbed campaign is supposedly rooted in portraying “real” women.
BTW, the video—created by Sao Paulo-based Soko—features a woman in the opening that appears to be model-quality talent. The video is also most focused on romancing the AI image of a White woman.
Dove boasts that adding “Dove Real Beauty” to AI prompts for beautiful women leads to images from its campaign. Duh. Such extraordinary bullshit.
If Dove’s long-standing grandstanding had even minimal effect on global culture, why would AI’s perception of beauty automatically maintain the Eurocentric standards that Dove has allegedly sought to counteract for decades?
“The Code” ultimately proves that the 20-year-old Dove Real Beauty campaign has utterly failed to achieve its propagandistic goal.
For Dove, AI stands for Absolute Insincerity.
Dove pledges not to use AI to portray real people in its ads
Anti-AI stance comes as the Dove Real Beauty campaign marks 20 years
By Phoebe Bain
For Dove, real beauty means no artificial intelligence. In the newest campaign for its long-running Real Beauty platform, the Unilever brand pledges to never use AI in its advertising to portray real people, while introducing a prompt that will yield more realistic body representations for people who do use AI to search for beauty images.
The skin care and hair care brand’s new “Real Beauty Prompt Guidelines” provide instructions for creating images using generative AI programs that are representative of “real beauty.” The effort comes as Dove celebrates the 20th year of the iconic campaign.
“Pledging to never use AI in our communications is just one step. We will not stop until beauty is a source of happiness, not anxiety, for every woman and girl,” Dove Chief Marketing Officer Alessandro Manfredi said in a recent email to Ad Age.
A new ad called “The Code” intends to shed light on AI’s impact on beauty standards. The video begins by showing what AI comes up with when prompted to create images of “the most beautiful woman in the world” (she’s blonde, thin and white), and it ends with what AI creates when prompted with “the most beautiful woman in the world, according to Dove Real Beauty Ad.” The latter AI-generated images show diverse women who look far more realistic. The ad includes a brief flashback to one of the original Real Beauty ads from 2004.
Other than for “The Code,” Dove has not used AI to represent real people in its ads, a brand spokesperson told Ad Age.
The ad was created by Sao Paulo-based Soko.
New study, other industry efforts
Dove conducted a global study for its Real Beauty campaign anniversary to better understand how people’s perception of beauty has changed in the two decades since the campaign launched. It found that AI has impacted the level of pressure women feel to be a certain type of beautiful, with 39% of women surveyed saying they feel “pressure to alter their appearance because of what they see online, even when they know it’s fake or AI-generated.”
The study also found that 73% of women feel more pressure to be beautiful than they did eight years ago, while 85% said they’ve been exposed to harmful beauty content online. Conducted by Edelman’s data consultancy Edelman DXI between November and December 2023, researchers spoke with 33,000 respondents in 20 countries for the survey.
Dove isn’t the only brand that has highlighted how AI images can negatively impact women. Direct-to-consumer period underwear brand Thinx’s new “GetBodyWise” campaign, created with BBDO Los Angeles, called attention to how AI has a tendency to characterize women’s health issues as inherently shameful, due to the ways in which AI is trained by biased human input.
Other companies, including CVS, have also made commitments around emphasizing beauty standard authenticity in their marketing materials. In 2021, CVS announced it had reached full transparency in marking beauty imagery either with its CVS Beauty Mark, for imagery that wasn’t materially altered, or with labeling signifying “digitally altered” images.
“At Dove, we seek a future in which women get to decide and declare what real beauty looks like—not algorithms. As we navigate the opportunities and challenges that come with new and emerging technology, we remain committed to protect, celebrate, and champion Real Beauty,” Manfredi said.
1 comment:
Unilever has exactly one way of supporting "diversity," and that's by driving work to white people in foreign countries far removed from the United States.
This particular campaign was, like many of their campaigns, the brainchild and paid work of white Brazilians, hiring other white Brazilians, to put white Brazilians in the driver's seat and spotlight, with a few darker-skinned actors (or in this case AI) tossed in as an afterthought.
When Unilever isn't paying white Brazilians to center themselves, they pay white Argentinians, to hire other white Argentinians, to put white Argentinians in the driver's seat, with some Blackish Brazilian talent flown in from Brazil to give the appearance of Black Americans, without having to pay any actual Black Americans.
That's the longtime, tried and tested and successful Unilever way of doing business.
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