[user104658]

Originally Posted by Jamie89

I don't find it racist at all tbh, and I doubt it will have been a calculated move either, I don't know why they'd see it as a good way of creating a talking point, Dove are a huge brand and something like a racism controversy would only damage them, they know they'd be more at risk of losing sales than increasing them so that doesn't make sense to me. It was a 3 second Facebook ad not a large marketing campaign so it's likely that any racist connotations were overlooked as less people will have been involved in the approval of it, as well as the fact that people only seemed to make the racist connection after the ad was screenshotted and taken out of context and put into a seperate post so it's not as though those connotations were glaringly obvious anyway - It's something that had to be pulled apart in order to find something racist in it rather than the complaints coming naturally from the ad itself, as far as I can tell.

Reactions like this could actually make companies like Dove more wary about using people of different races in their campaigns in the future out of fear of unforseen backlash so the people who are complaining should think about that and the impact they themselves might be having on diversity by choosing to pick apart and criticise something just because there is a black person in it, when it clearly wasn't intended as racist.

So you genuinely believe that at a multi-million pound company, with a huge marketing division full of highly paid professionals, who create adverts and keep their finger on the pulse of the public on a daily basis... not one person viewed the image of a black person removing their skin to reveal a white person - REGARDLESS OF INTENTION - and said "lol guys the internet is going to lose its **** over this".

I mean, come on.

If you had posted a sample of this on this forum, full of laypeople and ZERO advertising professionals, before it released and said "Will teh internets have a problem with this?", the answers would have ranged from "Yes, definitely" to "They shouldn't because it's PC gone mad but also yes because it's the internet".

Even the people who don't think it IS a problem still know that it WILL be a problem and that there will be a backlash.

But the at least 6 figure salary heads of avertising who have been in the ads game for decades at Dove, a Unilever company, one of the biggest parent companies in the world "got it wrong and didn't realise".

Jumping the shark majorly there let's face it.