Dove Comes In Hot With An Ad Suggesting That Their Soap Will Clean You From A Black Person To A White Person
Washington Post- The Dove brand sheepishly admitted that it had “missed the mark” with a not-so-vaguely racist advertisement that made it the latest target of consumer rage.
But many angry and befuddled Dove lovers spent the weekend wondering what mark Dove was trying to hit in the first place.
The ire-inducing advertisement — a static compilation of four photos — was released Saturday afternoon. The first frame shows a dark-skinned woman in what appears to be a bathroom, a bottle of Dove body wash in the lower right-hand corner of the picture.
“The short video was intended to convey that Dove body wash is for every woman and be a celebration of diversity, but we got it wrong,” the brand said Monday in a statement to Reuters.
Someone on the Dove marketing team is the son of the CEO. He’s like Spaulding from Caddyshack. The kid leans back in his swivel chair, puts his feet on his desk, and makes totally inappropriate jokes to the women in the office about his dick. Nobody says anything because the last guy who cried “nepotism!” now works in the boiler room, feeding coal into the furnace. That poor guy gets paid in free bars of soap which he needs because he uses an entire bar each day to remove the inch-thick layer of coal grime from his skin. He is the living embodiment of Dove’s whitewashing ads, an ironic truth that makes the CEO’s son laugh as he stuffs his mouth with Twizzlers and gooses passing interns with a “honk honk” noise.
For the most part, everyone ignores him. He’s a nuisance but he spends most of his day napping in the break room with his hands down his pants. However, every 5 years, he decides it’s time to contribute an idea. In 2011, he conceived of this IED, which the marketing team then attempted to bury in the back pages of some shitty, nearly-bankrupt magazines:
Few people saw it. But those that did took note. What? What is going on here?
Luckily for Dove, the outcry was handled by their PR team and the ad was buried and forgotten, for the most part.
Until today, when that little bastard checked his calendar and realized it was time to contribute again. “Remember that thing we did last time, with the black-to-white whitewashing thing? Let’s do something similar, but let’s make the white lady a redhead to REALLY emphasize how white you can become with our soap.” Oh boy.
In response, Dove reps said simply “we missed the mark.” That’s corporate-speak for “our hands were tied because the CEO’s son came up with it. We apologize, but it’s going to happen again.”
Of course, the internet:
But when it comes to racist advertising, we still don’t hold a candle to the Chinese though…