In most advertisements, women are portrayed to have the ideal body image. Young girls watch commercial after commercial showing beautiful and thin women with clear skin and long beautiful hair. It seems as if all the women in these advertisments are flawless. Recently, Dove has come out with a new campaign, which they titled "The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty." There are several new commercials portraying ordinary women of all shapes and sizes. Some feature very young girls and the way in which they are affected by the media. 

The overall message of the advertisement is that real beauty is not what we see on television every single day. Real beauty is not a stick thin model or someone with long silky hair or clear skin. Real beauty comes in all shapes and sizes and does not depend on what someone looks like. Real beauty depends on what is on the inside, on someone's personality and not their looks. Dove is trying to bring some clarity to young girls that there is more to life.

The target audience of this ad is women of all ages however, I believe that the main target is young girls. One of the commercials shows a young girl for several seconds and then shows all the media that she is soaking up. At the end the commercial reads "Talk your daughter before the beauty industry does." This commercial is particularly effective because it shows parents what their children are exposed to and how it can effect them. I think that Dove's goal is to change the way young girls see themselves and the way they believe they are supposed to look. Girls of this generation grow up thinking that they need to be insanely skinny to be pretty. They think that need to look like people that they see on television or in magazine advertisements in order to be accepted or liked. What they don't know is that these people are not the norm and that sometimes they are airbrushed and edited to look the way they do.  One of Dove's commercials shows a woman from an ad and the transformation she goes through to look the way she does. So much of her look is changed with computers and editing programs and she looks like a completley different person. Girls and women of all ages do not take this into consideration or understand that no one is actually that perfect. Dove's goal is change this way of thinking for future generations.

I am very impressed by this campaign because it is reassuring to see that someone has recognized the problem in the media and is trying to alter it. As a child who grew up looking at media advertisements of stick thin models, I can personally say that they affect the way young girls see themselves. Many girls have negative opinions of their body or believe that they are too fat when in reality they are of average size. I think that the Dove campaign is one of the most innovative of our time because it challenges the norms and goes against the standards of society. There is nothing that I would necessarily change about this campaign. I think that there are ways to improve its effectiveness such as making it more widespread. It may be that the campaign is fairly new and it will take time for it to become popular. I have viewed the commercials several times on television and on You Tube and I believe that after some time other companies will use the ideas of the Dove Campaign and support their efforts.