As if to say, "We in advertising didn't mean to sell things by deceiving people into thinking their lives would be better if they purchased our products," the team of Unilver, Annie Leibovitz and Pascal Dangin are all three denying the big story floating around late last week that the Dove 'Real Beauty' campaign was digitally altered to make the models more appealing. But it appears to be more damage control by Annie Leibovitz and her posse than it does by Unilver and Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency behind it all. Leibovitz didn't come into the campaign until two years after it started running and no one seems to want to talk about what was going on before she came into the picture, which is just about the same as saying, "Yeah, we were doing it before, but then our budget went up as the campaign got more high-profile, so we hired a big shot photographer who could hide all of their flaws in-camera." Here's a bit from Dangin, celebrated photo-retoucher:

The photos for that 2005 ad were taken by London celebrity fashion photographer Ian Rankin, not Ms. Leibovitz, with whom Mr. Dangin long has worked. Mr. Rankin couldn't be reached at press time.

"As directed by Ms. Leibovitz and Ogilvy & Mather, [the Pro-Age] photographs were retouched for dust and color correction," he said. "I did not mean to suggest that the women's shape, size, facial features or age were retouched. Consistent with the intent of Dove, Ogilvy & Mather, Annie Leibovitz, and my own guiding philosophy, the integrity of the photographs and the natural and unique beauty of the women were maintained."

As if to say, "We in advertising didn't mean to sell things by deceiving people into thinking their lives would be better if they purchased our products," the team of Unilver, Annie Leibovitz and Pascal Dangin are all three denying the big story floating around late last week that the Dove 'Real Beauty' campaign was digitally altered to make the models more appealing. But it appears to be more damage control by Annie Leibovitz and her posse than it does by Unilver and Ogilvy & Mather, the ad agency behind it all. Leibovitz didn't come into the campaign until two years after it started running and no one seems to want to talk about what was going on before she came into the picture, which is just about the same as saying, "Yeah, we were doing it before, but then our budget went up as the campaign got more high-profile, so we hired a big shot photographer who could hide all of their flaws in-camera." Here's a bit from Dangin, celebrated photo-retoucher:

The photos for that 2005 ad were taken by London celebrity fashion photographer Ian Rankin, not Ms. Leibovitz, with whom Mr. Dangin long has worked. Mr. Rankin couldn't be reached at press time.

"As directed by Ms. Leibovitz and Ogilvy & Mather, [the Pro-Age] photographs were retouched for dust and color correction," he said. "I did not mean to suggest that the women's shape, size, facial features or age were retouched. Consistent with the intent of Dove, Ogilvy & Mather, Annie Leibovitz, and my own guiding philosophy, the integrity of the photographs and the natural and unique beauty of the women were maintained."

Over at Nerve.com, they've assembled a list of the "50 greatest commercial parodies of all time," most of them drawn from the post-monologue slot on Saturday Night Live. The list includes many of our favorites, including the SNL spots for Crystal Gravy (#16) and Calvin Klein "Compulsion" (#29), but where is the classic Grayson Moorhead Securities parody? Dan Akroyd shilling for the Bass-o-matic takes the #1 ranking, and we're pleased to see that this ad for the First CityWide Change Bank came in at a respectable #7.

We can't even begin to tell you the giddy thrill we had reading AdAge's story, "Dove's 'Real Beauty' Pics Could Be Big Phonies." Like most media or ad people, this writer has disliked Unilever's entire deceptive 'Campaign for Real Beauty' from the start, from their billion-YouTube-views "Evolution" video to the massive push two years ago with the "regular women in underwear" ads. So it was with deliriously wonderful schadenfreude to read that The New Yorker has exposed, via a piece about hot shot photo-retoucher, Pascal Dangin, that there was extensive manipulation to make the women in the ads seem more appealing. So now, or soon to come, everyone will be up in arms about being blindly suckered into loving the campaign for its truth and honesty. Meanwhile, Unilever and Ogilvy & Mather, the agency behind the campaign, have been laughing all the way to the bank from the very start.

No, they should wear jeans. Expensive ones. At least that's the thinking of denim brand Seven for All Mankind, which recently shot its fall advertising campaign at Philip Johnson's iconic Glass House, set on a 47-acre New Canaan estate that is now a National Trust Historic Site (and has a spiffy identity designed by Pentagram). According to WWD, Seven is the first company or brand to use the Glass House as an advertising backdrop.

Acquired by apparel giant VF Corp. last year for $775 million, Seven is now trying to expand beyond denim into sportswear, accessories, and licensed products. And when we think of sportwear and accessories, we think, of course, of Philip Johnson! Managed by creative director Alex Sum, Seven's fall ad campaign at the Glass House was photographed by Patrick Demarchelier and features models Doutzen Kroes and Gabriel Chytry. When asked about the unique shoot location, Demarchelier told WWD, "It's fantastic, it's amazing."

Today's big automotive news is that Ford has agreed to sell Jaguar and Land Rover (the "luxury safari brands," as we like to call them) to India's Tata Motors for $2.3 billion ($600 million of which Ford will have to pay back into the Jaguar and Land Rover pension funds). But while Ford is cashing in on storied brands and BMW is messing around with glow-in-the-dark ads, Toyota is putting the identity of its Scion car in the hands of, well, anyone. Scion Speak, a new campaign by ad firm StrawberryFrog, encourages website visitors to create their own snazzy coat of arms, which can be adorned with everything from a butterfly and a cupcake to handcuffs and a spermatozoal trio. Using the handy drop-down menus, we selected a name for our crest (pictured above): "Chancellor Designer The Wack."

For maximum street cred, StrawberryFrog called in designer Tristan Eaton (perhaps best known for his covetable Kid Robot toys), who got to know the cultish Scion owners through nationwide focus groups. "Probably one of the most prominent incidents was driving in L.A. in a Scion and seeing another Scion pass us, honk the horn, and wave at us," says Eaton. "At that point, I realized OK, these guys are their own culture."

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Our very own sister blog, FishbowlNY, has gotten into the business of critiquing design with their recent post calling out an ad popping up everywhere in New York for a new Urban Outfitters opening in Brooklyn. Sure, it's kinda clever, like everything they do at the world's greatest supplier of irony, designed to look like a homemade, glue-and-paste sort of thing that you might see an average joe putting together and posting in their laudromat. Unfortunately, what they didn't seem to care about were details that had anything to do with the neighborhood they were moving into, just a collection of things people outside of the NY area might associate with Brooklyn.

2. Paul's Boutique was in Manhattan, dipwads.

Almost serving as something of a response to Paula Scher's commentary we posted the other day about the new golden age of advertising embracing good design, Joe Duffy over at AdWeek is following suit with his recent, lengthy story, "By and For the People." In it, he explains why he thinks not just advertising is finally coming around and getting why design is so important in this fractured landscape of potential ad buys and unreliable rate of return numbers, but how opening up the centuries old speaker-to-receiver method to something more like a "you tell us what you want" style, is better for the industry as a whole and everyone had better embrace that truth before they're left behind. There's a bunch going on in the piece, but it's a solid read, particularly if you're in the industry of creatively selling stuff. It also has some nice "up with people!" moments:

Design, in its broadest definition, is not just another way to market a product or a new version of advertising. Design is a way to create a more meaningful existence, a way to transform a mundane lifestyle into one that separates one person's life from another's. Design can change the way we look at the world as well as the way the world sees us. It's a way of leading a unique and individualized existence, a better life.

If you haven't already picked up that new copy of Blade Runner (the fifteenth in a series of seventy-nine editions that will be released over time), you might want to brush up a little on the future, because it is now upon us. AdAge is reporting on the LA Times having purchased a large block of Clear Channel's newly-tweaked, digital billboards all over Los Angeles. Sure, we've all seen these sorts of massive screens any time we're in places like sports stadiums and in the thick of Times Square, but these billboards not only project changing, motion images, but will be connected by the internet for instantaneous updates and will have cameras connected, so the billboard can look back at drivers and report on anything around them (for instance "Ocean Monster Surfaces, Destroys Freeway"). So if you're out there looking for a new career, it looks like we're now going to have to start creating some new kinds of positions, like, "Sr. Internet Billboard Designer" or "Assistant Internet Billboard Copy Editor." Here's a bit:

The billboards' content will rotate roughly every eight seconds, and can be updated at any time from the Times' digital newsroom. Additionally, Clear Channel Outdoor will have its own cameras in place at each of the billboards so the newspaper can perform maintenance and follow traffic in real-time. This is the first time Clear Channel Outdoor has offered such a service to a digital-billboard client.

Somehow we missed this one, but that's why we depend on things like Michael Surtees's DesignNotes to grab them. So we found by way of his site, an essay by Pentagramian and everyone's favorite Bush snubber, Paula Scher, in Creativity magazine entitled, "Advertising Got Better." It concerns just that, about Scher noticing that, following September 11th, ad agencies really seemed determined to step up their game, running better, stronger campaigns and with far more confident design work. It's changed so much, she thinks, that it's made her question why the graphic design community, those who don't work in the ad business, haven't really taken hold of this new situation. Here's a bit:

I don't exactly know why this has occurred. I know that graphic design students, for the first time in decades, are considering advertising agency jobs as viable. The talented design staffs of some web and interactive companies from the nineties that imploded, like MarchFirst, may have relocated at the better agencies. Also, some agencies have hired terrific graphic designers as creative directors, where formerly the creative directors would have come from the copy side of agency. My former design staffs, after leaving my employ, have traditionally gone into magazine design, book design, or worked at in-house art departments for entertainment media companies. In the past five years, several that have left have either freelanced for or taken jobs at advertising agencies. I can't remember that happening in over thirty years.

Our guess, if you'll allow us to chime in, is that the internet really, really took off at around the same time. The burst bubble was starting to heal and with all of these MySpaces and the Web 2.0-ery everywhere, it forced advertising to start using a shotgun instead of a rifle. When you have so many outlets to cover, you put the emphasis on covering them, not focusing so much on design by committee. Add to that almost a decade of clients who can't keep up with the speed of a million new trends per day and you have a situation where things are free to be a little more interesting, even if, in the end, they're still hocking goods.