“Real beauty” from the makers of Axe?

From our pal Carrie McLaren over at StayFree Magazine:

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.