This case study explored the top two viral video advertisements in Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” from their YouTube channel to further understand the cultural expectations of the twenty-first century women represented within these advertisements. Utilizing the theoretical framework of a (visual) ideograph as defined by McGee (1980) and Edwards and Winkle (1997), this case study investigated the implications of the presented verbal and visual rhetoric and how this rhetoric defined in the space of these advertisements. Analysis showed to encompass three exploratory terminologies: self-deprecating disconnect, appearance-based beauty as real beauty, and dependent woman.
Self-deprecating disconnect highlighted the disparaging view the women held towards themselves and their inability to reconcile their negative measures of self-esteem. Appearance-based beauty illustrated the focus on the outward beauty of women’s faces and bodies in an attempt to embrace all kinds of physical beauty and how this dismissed and ignored the other aspects of what defines women. Dependent woman emphasized how, in the advertisements, to be a means relying on an authoritative force to dictate your mindset. While only a snapshot of a single advertising campaign marketed to women, this case study demonstrated that there are still degrading, power-depriving representations of women in advertisements and the need to understand better, not in how it functions as a direct reference to actual women, but as “an ideological understanding of the rhetorical meaning of women” (Dubriwny, 2005, p. 98) within the discourse of a larger ideological community.
About the presenterCorinne Kasura
Current Ph.D student in Communication and Rhetoric at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Study interests including critical studies of advertising and pedagogical methods of human-computer interactions.