The Weight of the World

One of my favorite ad campaigns of all time is the Dove CampaignforRealBeauty.com. The website features real girls with real issues about their self-esteem. It claims that 92% of females surveyed have something to hypothetically change in their appearance, and 35% of the time, it’s their weight.

When I first saw the poster of six scantily-clad women, I realized that something didn’t fit. The women on the poster weren’t the typical Victoria’s Secret models that I’m accustomed to one day dating. For starters, some of them were black. But the next thing that I noticed was that they were bigger. As an equal opportunist for beautiful, confident women of all colors and sizes, this was a huge turn on. And to this day, I talk about it as if it changed my life. Because it did. (My advertising life, at least.)

Today, there’s a thriving industry selling plus-sized fashion. But for that year, 2006, that these women weren’t wearing dark colors or vertical stripes, or anything at all but white bras and panties, it was, figuratively, tits. These were real women with real curves. And they were sexy.

That campaign went on to sweep the world with billboards proclaiming wrinkles as wonderful, freckles to be flawless, and a youtube video that has gotten millions of hits from men and women of all shapes and sizes, including aspiring art directors who needed a quick photoshop tutorial.

It was, and still is a caring, heartfelt marketing effort by Dove, a brand that is—surprisingly—still in the business of selling dirt-removing soap, moisturizing cream, and exfoliant. Their mantra of ‘be yourself and love yourself’ apparently has limits on how yourself you can actually be.

Thus, I was thrilled when I started watching the reality TV show The Biggest Loser. As a humanitarian that abstains from eating humans, I found the intense workouts and the punishing regimens by the contestants to be so inspiring, even my eyeballs were sweating by the season finale. I wasn’t crying. No, I save my tears for real emergencies. Like saving a nail from getting hit by a hammer.

Finally, someone took the Dove campaign to the next level. Finally, there was a place for dangerously obese men and women on television, aside from Queens, NY; a plus-sized niche on prime time that was raking in the low-cal, high-fiber ad dollars.

The Dove campaign was great, despite controversial leaks that the six women in their underwear did indeed get some airbrushing of their own. However, I think that The Biggest Loser really takes the cake as to what entertainment and advertising should be. This show goes above and beyond the typical marketing strategy of putting "good-looking" people on air, because I’ve seen the contestants in the finale at their thinnest and fittest, and they’re not drop-dead gorgeous. But they are beautiful, as I think all women are, and should acknowledge in themselves. On another TV breakthrough, the producers didn’t introduce a teenage vampire mid-season, and there is no laugh track. True, there is the element of alliances and voting off of dieters, a disregard of success or failure in the simple objective of the game. But while as in life, it doesn’t follow that we should like the best, the smartest, or the richest we are surrounded with, we can and should always help the ones we do like to succeed as much as we can.

The Biggest Loser is so revolutionary in the way it goes beyond the two benchmarks of success in the freakfest we call cable entertainment; product placement and Nielsen ratings. Last I saw, it was just Jell-O and 24-Hour Fitness that was prominently displayed. This show is all about rejecting reality; by the contestants, and the norms of beauty in a society. They reject being at risk of weight-related illnesses, skipping parties and doctor’s appointments (stuff you learn from the Dove website) and supplant it with the brilliance of a TV show producer’s vision, and hundreds of thousands of US dollars. It is oozing with high-minded, transformative qualities that the Dove company couldn’t possibly turn into moisturizing gravy, even if they were run by the Nazi fourth Reich.

With the biggest contest on Earth coming to Asia, I can’t wait for the fervor of health and wealth to sweep the continent. But most importantly, I can’t wait for the conversations to start in households, amongst couples, and in the minds of youngsters who are at risk of living a life of obesity. There is no taboo in being overweight, only in bringing it up. The elephant in the room is not the pants that need four hands to zip it up. It’s in our inability to call a spade a spade.

Dove did a marvelous thing by calling a spade a real, beautiful spade. But nothing compares to seeing a bunch of hopeful, honest, fat people at an audition shouting out, “I’m The Biggest Loser!”