Real blog posts have curves...

I hate to admit that the first thing I thought of when I heard Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty was how much it's name reminded me of the Campaign for Real Ale, a British group dediated to the preservation of warm, lightly fizzed, cask-conditioned beer. Which is probably yet another indicator of the beer-induced haze that Mad Anthony spent part of his college years in.

But the Dove campaign, which has 6 real women in their underwear on TV ads and billboards, has been getting quite a bit of attention - Reason's Hit and Run, of all places, has a pretty good roundup. Reaction is a mix of "what is Dove thinking using fat chicks" to "hurray for Dove for using fat chicks".

The campaign is a nice idea - it's different, and it's getting Dove a ton of free publicty from all the talk the ads are generating. But the fact that people keep talking about the girls in the ads as fat seems to be proof that models are usually real skinny. A couple of the girls in the ads are what I might call "thick" or "big girls", but a drive past Wal-Mart will convince most people that there are way bigger women out there. And the rest of the girls are pretty normal looking, and Singrid - the little blond chick - is a genuine hottie.

Thus, I think any claims that this is some sort of shift in advertising, that fat is the new skinny, are way off. At least until someone offers Mad Anthony an advertising contract. Maybe I could do deotorant ads - I mean, they always have this strong,muscular guys. It's time for a deotorant for fat lazy people who sweat a lot. It's the role I was born to play.