Purposive Communication Activity: Culturally

Insensitive Advertising

Dove, owned by Unilever, is a global skincare brand that has faced criticism for a Facebook
advertisement in the year 2017 because they showed a black woman changing into a white
woman after using Dove body wash.

In the brief three-second clip, a young black woman can be seen grinning as she reveals a
white woman in a nude shirt beneath her dark brown shirt. The racist advertisement was
removed shortly after it was uploaded to Dove's American page and received a lot of
backlash. The advertisement led many on social media to conclude that the black woman
was less hygienic than the white woman in the picture. Due to such advertisement most of
the almost 1,000 responses concurred that the advertisement was derogatory, if not racist.