The Hindu Business Line : Big, real and beautiful

BILLBOARDs and print ads in the US are suddenly looking more wholesome, literally. Commuters in New York's subways and elsewhere, used to glamorously thin models dominating billboards are being treated to images of real-sized women, fleshy curves included, promoting a range of products from body firming lotions to exercise gear to healthy food options. And, surprise, surprise, the trend seems to be catching on.

The world's largest athletic shoes manufacturer, Nike Inc, is on the verge of launching a major campaign this week that uses women with `real' body shapes and sizes to promote a new range of exercise gear. "My butt is big," goes the first line of one of the new ads, showing an extreme close-up of the body part under discussion. "I have got thunder thighs and that is a compliment," goes another. "My shoulders aren't dainty and they are not proportional to my hips ... ," goes the third. The images are from a new print and Internet campaign for the shoe manufacturer and are glorifying body parts that have until now been tucked out of sight in advertising.

Nike's new campaign comes close on the heels of Unilever's `campaign for true beauty' for its Dove range of personal care products. The print and outdoors campaign launched last month grabbed consumer eyeballs and attention for images of half-a-dozen women, from sizes 4-12 with nothing on but their underwear and brilliant smiles. None of the women in the Dove ads are professional models and show every sign of being ordinary women with generous figures and more than a wobble on the abdomen.

Welcome to the brave new world of advertising in the US where everything from toothbrushes to tea bags are promoted by airbrushed, anorexic, waif-thin hotties who don't in the least look like they eat the particular brand of chocolate or cookies that they sell. The flurry of reality ads has sparked off a fair bit of debate within the media and the industry but what almost everybody agrees on is that if the trend, if it survives, continues, then it can be the best thing that happened to American women who are constantly caught in the crossfire between what is real as opposed to what is ideal.

Madison Avenue's image makers, at least for now, seem to have found a new method to their madness and the women in the highly competitive advertising world are expressing relief that they can finally get to see ads that they can identify with and relate to, before unleashing them on an unsuspecting audience. "These kind of ads is indicative of a major change in the industry and are definitely more realistic than what women are otherwise portrayed as in advertising. The industry seems to be finally getting the message that women are tired of being talked to as if they are brainless. We don't want to be told that we are not good enough as we are and that we have to be aspire to be the women in the ads," Liz Schroeder, Executive Director, Advertising Women of New York (AWNY), a professional body of women in the industry, told Catalyst.

That this kind of a marketing strategy makes eminent marketing sense is evident from the fact that when Unilever's Dove campaign initially launched in the UK last year, with real life women in their ads, sales of the firming lotion shot up over 700 per cent. In addition, the company grossed a huge kitty of goodwill from the female of the species, many of who are well into their forties and not willing to be overlooked for it.

Industry watchers here are saying that Madison Avenue and its clients are finally coming to terms with the fact that it does not make any great financial sense to alienate women, especially considering the fact they are the largest segment of consumers and make decisions on big-ticket purchases. Also, some of them point out, unlike their counterparts of a few decades ago, the younger generation is far more confident about who they are and what they can be, which is not often the same as media images of what they should be.

The current spate of `reality ads' may have cheered the hearts of women across the country but they are definitely not the first ads of its kind. In 1997, the Body Shop ran a campaign with a voluptuous doll, Ruby, and a tag line that read "There are three billion women who don't look like supermodels and only eight who do." The trouble with these attempts, cynics point out, is the fact that they don't sustain themselves long enough to make an impact. "As young adults and children spend lesser time reading and watching television, advertising is becoming less effective. The new campaigns are desperate attempts by an industry under pressure to grab consumer attention by creating shock value," says Gerald Celente, Director of the Trends Research Institute.

He adds: "They might get the consumer's attention but only briefly. Using real people in ad campaigns cannot work in the long-term because the job of advertising is to create fantasy images that people will aspire for. People want to escape from reality. I personally think women will want to be more fashionably South Beach than overweight middle America. Who wants to see a big butt on a billboard? I personally think that these are compensation ads for the country's ever increasing obesity issue and gives out the message that it is ok if you are fat."

The industry, meanwhile, seems to be all set to continue the trend with at least a couple of Dove ads in the same vein expected any time now. And, says Schroedder, it probably has a lot to do with AWNY's `Good, bad and ugly' awards which recognise path-breaking campaigns that present women in non-stereotypical images. "The awards send out a firm message that women are tuned in to what is happening around them and that they can have the last word by exercising their purchase decision for or against a brand," signs off Schroeder.

It remains to be seen whether the seduction of porcelain, high cheekbones and impossibly thin unattainable figures wins over the harsh reality of wrinkles, cellulite and laugh lines, never mind that this is how most women look like in real life.

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