Originally posted by kops21:
sundaytimes 10july lifestyle front page
oh found it...
July 10, 2005
Cream of the crop
These 'real' Singaporean women who dare to bare show you don't have to be model thin to be super fabulous
By Leong Su-lin
YOU would think it would take more than $1,000 and a party to get women to pose in their underwear in an advertising campaign.
Photos: Desmond Foo
Not so in Singapore. At least, for more than 1,000 women who answered the call to be in Dove's latest campaign. The nationwide search from late April to early last month was to scout for six 'real women' to promote Dove Firming Cream Shower.
The chosen six would then win $1,000 each and get to party with their friends on a yacht.
All they had to do was to pose with each other in their underwear in a print advertisement that would run for two weeks.
The result was unveiled in a Dove Firm Friends advertisement in last week's LifeStyle, with the tagline 'No models were used in the making of this poster'.
With ages ranging from 23 to 30, the women have diverse careers in travel, graphic design and information technology.
Using real women as testimonials is not new to Dove, which has used the formula to promote its shampoos, conditioners and bar soaps worldwide since 1969.
In Singapore, Dove's first testimonial advertisement was for Dove Bar Soap in 1992.
But it is the first time that the beauty brand, owned by British-Dutch consumer goods company Unilever, has recruited real women to pose in their underwear here.
The Firm Friends campaign, jointly conceptualised by Ogilvy & Mather Advertising and Unilever in Britain, has run in Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. Each country uses its own set of real people. Singapore is the first country in Asia to run the advertisement.
Ms Toni Chew, Unilever's product group manager, says the decision to pose the winners in their underwear was a last-minute one, made only after 10 finalists were chosen early last month.
'We had two options - to either feature the girls in towels or underwear, which would have been more ideal because it shows off their body shapes better,' she says.
'To our pleasant surprise, six of the 10 finalists agreed readily to pose in underwear, which shows how comfortable they are with their bodies.'
So exactly who are the six vivacious women posing playfully in the advertisement?
LifeStyle's attempts to score a shoot with them proved to be more difficult than getting Victoria Beckham to smile when she was in Singapore last week with her husband David for the IOC bids.
Ogilvy & Mather in Singapore said only four of the six were available for a shoot and that one of them was 'not agreeable to posing in a bikini'.
Bobbie Ng, 27, who owns a make-up service, could only do a phone interview due to her work schedule.
The sixth - IT consultant Aminah Nordin, in her 20s, - has been dropped from the campaign.
She was unavailable for comment, and although there is no official statement from Unilever, a source says Aminah's withdrawal was 'jointly agreed on by Unilever and herself'.
Apparently, the decision was made to avoid any controversy that might arise from her posing in underwear because she is Muslim.
The campaign will continue to run until next week as planned, but instead of the group shots that were featured earlier, individual portraits of the women will now be used.