Charity Public Service Advertisements

Advert 1: Dove

This radio advertisement focuses on unrealistic expectations of beauty set by magazines and how it affects women's confidence. We can safely say as the voice over artist(s) is female, the ad is targeted mainly at women. Females on magazines etc. are made to look a certain way, so then the audience's feel as though they are no longer adequate and should look how they are perceived on magazines, although the beauty of these women has been finely tuned and a woman could never live up to the example set. Dove have cleverly linked advertising their brand with siding with their audience. This makes the audience feel as though they can relate to the FVO and creates a confidence between the advert and the audience. We could say that Dove are taking advantage of the fact women feel this way as they know that women are generally more pressured to look amazing all the time and in modern society it is hard for a women to be in her natural form without being made to feel they need to do and wear certain things to make them acceptable. This advertisement is multi corporation, meaning it covers across the whole of the UK. Although it sounds like a charity/public service ad, it is in fact an advert by a multi corporation for a product. One of the main persuasive techniques used in this advertisement is by Dove insinuating that other products are bad and they want to make them artificially beautiful. By doing this, it makes the audience feel like any other product/brand on the market which represents women in a certain way (which is the majority of them) are against them and Dove are the only product for them. Another technique used is representing artificial beauty by using auto tune on the singer's voice. This is obvious when toward the end of the advertisement, the auto tune is removed and the FVO sings about realising the beauty of these women are not real. The style of advert is supportive, intimate, positive and soothing. All factors which are appealing to the target audience (women) about the matter in hand. The tagline which is said at the end of the advert 'Be your beautiful self' fits in well because the whole idea of the advert is to make women feel they are fine as they are, so reassuring them in spoken words and said right at the end of the advert will stick in the audience's head and make them feel good about themselves.