Beauty image onslaught

A little girl with long strawberry blonde hair stares into the camera as the background music warns, "Here it Comes." As the music speeds up, a barrage of beauty images and messages flash across the screen until the short ad ends with a message: "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does."

The clever ad, produced by the Dove Self-Esteem Fund, has been viewed almost a million times on YouTube. But now critics are charging Unilever, maker of Dove, with hypocrisy. Advertising Age says the ad has resulted in "strong and enduring blowback against Unilever from activists, newspaper op-ed writers, bloggers and videographers who see it as hypocritical coming from the same company that markets Axe."

Axe is a body spray, also made by Unilever, which uses images of sexy women to sell the product to young men-exactly the thing "Onslaught" so cleverly criticizes. One critic, Rye Clifton, posted a video response on YouTube. It mashes up images from the original "Onslaught" ad with images from Axe commercials and ends with the tag line, "Talk to your daughter before Unilever does."

According to Ad Age, "Onslaught" may have had at least one unintended consequence --- "getting the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, an advocacy group to protect children from marketing, to demand Unilever stop running Axe ads." A spokesman for that group said, "The whole idea of 'Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does' certainly motivated us to do a campaign around this… Unilever is the beauty industry. To point fingers at other brands and at the same time be taking advantage of the same horrific marketing other companies are doing is incredibly hypocritical."