Text asks company to “sign the Truth in Advertising Heroes Pledge,” be a trendsetter

Aug 11, 2014 16:53 GMT  ·  By

For years, Dove has been building its campaigns around the concept of “real beauty,” which, most often than not, includes a minimum amount of Photoshop, body diversity, and very little makeup. Because of the central message of most Dove campaigns, one father of girls wants the company to set the tone in signing the Truth in Advertising Heroes Pledge.

Seth Matlins is father to two girls and a former advertising executive from Los Angeles and he started a petition on Change.org in which he’s basically urging Dove to put their money where their mouth is (figuratively so) and adopt a full-disclosure policy on Photoshop.

In a world in which all media images are retouched, children are exposed to them no matter how hard parents might try to prevent it, and in time they alter the kids’ sense of reality and expectations.

The petition asks the beauty giant to “Photoshop-and-tell” and to not “Run Photoshopped Ads Where Kids Can See Them.” By agreeing to do this, Dove will stay true to its “Real Beauty” slogan, and perhaps more importantly, set the tone for other companies to follow.

All it takes is just one company to get the ball rolling, and Mr. Matlins hopes that Dove will be it. He even provides the figures that prompted him to start the petition – and they’re very troubling, to say the least.

“53% of 13 year-old girls are unhappy with their bodies. That by the time they're 17, 78% will be. Or that 3 of the most common mental health problems among girls... eating disorders, depression, and low self-esteem, can each be linked to the depiction of girls and women in the media,” he writes.

“That 30% of HS girls and 16% of HS boys suffer from disordered eating. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of all mental illnesses. And that 80% of adult women feel worse about themselves after seeing a beauty ad, with 1 out of 3 of them describing their ideal body as one that doesn't even exist in nature,” Mr. Matlins continues.

Dove has been pushing the “Real Beauty” agenda for nearly a decade, so taking this endeavor to the next stage should not prove impossible for them, the petition states. If they’re behind real beauty in advertising, they should be behind it all the way.

The photo attached to this article is a screenshot from one of the first and most mediated “Real Beauty” Dove ads. Called “Evolution,” it showed the amount of Photoshop that went into making a model look “perfect” and billboard-ready. Useless to add, that model had very little in common with the real one.

You can see the ad below.