“68 percent of women can’t identify with the images they see in ads.” – Dove’s Global Beauty and Confidence Report, 2016
Creative agency Mindshare in Denmark are on a mission – destroy advertiser’s ideas of ‘real’ women. The reason? The media’s portrayal of women across both digital and print are wildly unidentifiable for women across the world.
https://vimeo.com/212540553
Image_Hack is a project funded by Dove to tackle this particular industry problem which is portraying women as objects rather than people. A simple search for ‘beautiful woman’ on a stock photo site will return results of scantily clad women with a full face of makeup and perfectly coiffed hair – unfortunately this is not a reflection of the beauty that women encompass every day in our society.
The project saw a number of award winning advertising photographers take a series of photos of natural women. By working with one of the world’s largest stock photo database websites Shutterstock, Mindshare successfully uploaded and manually tagged these images so that they would show in common searches when advertisers are looking for photos of women to promote their brand.
‘Hacking’ into the search results forces these inclusive photos of women to be presented and considered by agencies in hopes of the industry showing far greater diversity when it comes to portraying women.
“We all have a responsibility for portraying women the way we do in advertising—by portraying the stereotypical beauty ideals. If we, as an industry, change the way we portray women, we can be a part of changing women’s self-image.” – Mette Bierbum Bacher, Mindshare strategist.
Find out more about Image_Hack here