Dove's ProAge Campaign:
A Contemporary Discourse of Western Beauty Ideals

Billboard Advertising

The previous modes of visual analysis have all been beneficial in their application to visual evidence, working from inside the material parameters of the text. Semiotics and discourse analysis I illustrated the viewer-subject relations, ideologies and cohesive discourse found inside the ProAge campaign's print advertisements. Psychoanalysis allowed us to gain a deeper social understanding of viewer-subject relations, by examining the gendered hegemonic tensions working from within the parameters of the campaign's marketing medium of television. However, in order to depict a more accurate understanding of Dove's ProAge campaign, it is important to shift the analytical emphasis away from the details of individual images and towards the production and application processes of the institutional apparatus and technologies that surround them (Rose, 175/177). The medium of billboard advertising is a third approach of the ProAge campaign that is highly influential in reaching consumer audiences. While the ProAge print ads are circulated amongst voluntary magazine readers of relatively target-specific audiences, the billboard ads are similar in physical layout and content but reach a much wider range of audiences who are both voluntary and involuntary viewers. The following image represents a real-life billboard that recently existed in the highly public space of New York City's Times Square. For viewers who are even vaguely familiar with American culture, Times Square is an epicenter for diversity, with streets congested by an international flow pedestrian traffic. At any given time of day or night, the street-blocks of Times Square are filled with a diversely populated range of both national and international visitors. It is logical then, that by placing a two-fold ProAge billboard in this location, the subject matter will be viewed by a vast spectrum of audiences, reaching people who generally exist far outside the campaign's natural reach of advertising.

                Unlike discourse analysis I, the second kind of discourse analysis examines visual material by first placing it within its existing institutional context. Secondly, discourse analysis II identifies the material apparatus of the subject matter, which translates the institutional power into real-life form. Thirdly, these methods interpret sets of visual evidence by articulating the practical techniques employed by the apparatus to maintain the power and knowledge of its institution. The status of Times Square as an institution provides a way of examining the methodology of discourse analysis II. The actual two-sided billboard serves as the institutional apparatus, exerting the power and knowledge of its institution through its various technologies. Although this ad is a visual representation of meanings that have been defined by Dove for a target demographic of "mature-adult females", it gains new and unpredictable interpretations when placed in the public space of Times Square.

                This two-sided advertisement for ProAge is divided into two billboards containing separate images. The first billboard is filled by 3 enlarged photographic images of nude female figures. For audience members who are already familiar with the ProAge campaign, they can probably recognize the models from images in the campaign's series of print ads. However, the circulation of the ProAge print ads is primarily controlled within a limited demographic of viewers. Out of context, the meaning of these nude female models can be easily misconstrued. These photographic images do however represent unique real-world people, functioning as elements of their built environment that produce and discipline the participant interaction through its materialized discourse. The patrons and curators of this ad have produced a social understanding for these images that is marked by notions of empowered femininity and defiance against equating youth with beauty. However, many unfamiliar visitors of this billboard are probably unable to interpret this specific meaning, and may assert the figures as controversial, provocative, or even aesthetically unappealing.

                The second billboard contains a salient and hyperclear representation of actual ProAge products, that have been framed together to form a mortise. Alongside this visual image is an eye-catching textual sign that confronts viewers with the question, "are you anti-age or pro-age?" With these words, producers of the ad hope to guide un-familiarized visitors into their intended interpretation. This text affirms the non-offensive nature of the photographic images, and legitimizes the ad's appropriateness in its surrounding public space.


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