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Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the last week or so, you've probably heard about the new Ogilvy & Mather (Toronto) ad, Onslaught, that is the next extension of Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty. (Hey Ogilvy & Mather, what IS that freaky "Casio VL-tone" music on your site all about.. the sorta electronic-oompah-robot-boogie music...??)

In it, a young girl is bombarded with beauty and fashion industry ads at a staccato-pace, to represent what a typical young girl would see throughout her childhood.

Perhaps I'm jaded, but I wasn't wowed by it. Of course it's good, you'd have to be a complete loon not to like it. Just as with Evolution, Onslaught comes off as a PSA instead of an ad. (Educate yourself! Oh, and by the way, pick up some Dove next time you're out at the store.) And, it is a perfect example of framing - positioning your ad around the accepted beliefs and values of your target market. Kudos to the Ogilvy team.

It is hard to follow up the wild success of Evolution, and they've done quite well. And, it's not very often that you see an agency that really, really gets viral.

So what was it that was bothering me? I do see it as a little hypocritical, but as Steve Hall at Adrants pointed out:

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.

But I was also struck by Ypulse's Anastasia Goodstein's comment, "It just feels weird to me to create an ad as provocative as "Onslaught" and share such powerful research and not focus on the root of the problem, i.e. the ads themselves, and the teen magazine industry that is dependent on these advertisers for their existence." She went on to point out some stats from Hearst's teen magazines:

• 80% made a purchase as a result of seeing an ad in Seventeen or CosmoGIRL! in the last 12 months; only 47% had as a result of seeing an ad online.
• 63% trust the ads they see in teen magazines, and 68% feel that the ads are "targeted to me."

I'm certainly not saying you need to go to the extreme of shocking kids with the horrors of anorexia, like the controversial Nolita ads. But, the beauty industry as a whole needs to focus less on unrealistic expectations. Not just Dove.

So while Onslaught may not be the original spark that Evolution was, the Dove campaign is excellent in its ongoing commitment. Now I just wish that Unilever (Dove is a Unilever brand) would do something about its other product ads… say, Slim-Fast and AXE.

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