Greenpeace takes aim at Dove’s ‘toxic influence’
The environmental organisation is calling out Dove’s plastic problem by using the brand’s campaign film Toxic Influence for inspiration
Greenpeace UK is calling out Dove in its new campaign film, Toxic Influence: The Dark Side of Dove, directed by Alice Russell.
The work directly references Dove’s 2022 film, also called Toxic Influence, which showed mothers and daughters in a studio as they were confronted with the reality of how social media and technology are affecting young women today. A New York Times piece at the time said that “as marketing, it’s almost genius: adopting a righteous tone while remaining as broadly inoffensive as any megabrand desires”.
The Greenpeace film follows the same format of mothers and daughters in a studio, but instead of watching content about the harms of tech, they’re shown footage of Dove’s own ‘toxic influence’ of plastic waste. The concept will only land if people are familiar with the Dove film, though that should at least mean most of adland, considering the original was widely covered in the creative press and picked up awards at Cannes Lions and the Clios.
The Greenpeace work has been launched for the 20th anniversary of Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, which was heralded for changing how women were portrayed in beauty advertising at the time.
It follows on from Greenpeace’s 2023 report on Unilever’s reliance on plastic, and comes shortly after Greenpeace campaigners created a blockade at Unilever’s London headquarters earlier this month, where they also revealed a banner stating that ‘Real Beauty isn’t this toxic’. The protest resulted in 35 arrests.
The new film makes the case that while Dove is all about empowering women, it’s generally understood that it’s women of colour that are suffering the worst effects of the climate crisis that Dove is in part contributing to.
Of course, Dove and parent company Unilever are not alone in causing waste and pollution; they’re part of an industry-wide problem. However Dove’s 20 years of purpose-led marketing – which Nick Asbury cross-examines in his recent book – undeniably makes it more fallible to criticism when it turns out that it’s not always making the world a better place after all.
“They know there’s no Real Beauty in the real harm caused by Dove’s plastic pollution,” Greenpeace UK campaigner Anna Diski says of the brand. “They can’t keep flooding the world with unimaginable amounts of harmful plastic. That’s why Dove must stop selling plastic sachets now and commit to phasing out single-use plastic within a decade.”
