The above advertisement is from the care brand company called dove. In this ad, dove wants to advertise their new body wash that is meant to help one gain clearer and smoother skin. As stated within the ad itself, with dove’s creme de body wash there is “visibly more beautiful skin from the most unexpected of places – your shower”. However, this ad received a large amount of backlash as it implied the idea “black women are not beautiful and white women are beautiful”, hence the before and after effect. In the ad, the facial expressions of the women would ideally suggest they are happy with the way things are portrayed, but intuition to me suggests that the black woman has “accepted her fate” as she is portrayed as the “ugly and before factor” and that the smile on her is a way to cover up what she is truly feeling. Black discrimination of women happens mainly in the United States of America where this idea of white dominance sprang up around 1619. Now in modern times, though the amount of discrimination has gone down, there are still occasions such as this one where many have unknowingly done this. There are two ways to look at this, Dove is a care brand company that wishes to represent the diversity of real beauty and they have core beliefs that all women are beautiful, hence they had no intentions of any discrimination of black women. However, what the ad wrongfully portrayed is a mistake occurred by the marketing team of Dove.
The above advertisement is from ‘Sisley’ which is a line from the luxurious Italian fashion company called Benetton group. In this ad, Sisley wants to advertise how dashing their fashion line, so much to the point it becomes “addictive” for everyone. However, the advertisement received a lot of backlashes. The portrayal of “Addiction” in this ad is referring to fashion but with the facial expression and actions of the people within the ad, this implies drugs such as cocaine. The act of ‘Snorting’ the clothes can be seen as something that is very harmful because of unprescribed drugs are very harmful to people. Personally, I feel that almost every culture would see this advertisement as offensive because of the rather odd way of representing clothing and associating this with drug use. Another minor aspect as to how this might be an offensive ad is because the clothing shown is from Italy which is then combined with this idea of addiction which implies that Italian fashion is the best and not other styles of fashion. The advertisement is aimed at showing people what type of variety ‘Sisley’ provides. But the approach to the advertisement is what caused the severe backlash.
Well done Mathew – some good insights here. It would be good to establish first where each advert was originally published, then explore what the adverts are assuming about the values within those cultures before finally looking at how or if these adverts would work in other cultures.