"There's no question baby boomers feel better about their bodies," Simmons said, "and are determined to age beautifully." Simmons said, "It feels there are real voices of women coming through" in the Dove and Nike ads. "I applaud the trend."
Nancy Monsarrat, US director for advertising at Nike in Beaverton, Oregon, said that in addition to the different attitudes about body image among boomer women, "younger women have a diffe-rent perspective" than their counterparts did a decade or two ago.
"They're more personally independent about who they can and should be," Monsarrat said, which is also reflected in the campaign's approach.
"One of the things we've noticed is if you go to an exercise class, if you go to a marathon, active women come in a lot of shapes and sizes," she added. "This can be a great celebration of that."
Fitness and health are also the focus of the Chicken of the Sea commercial, said John Signorino, the company's presi-dent and chief executive, in San Diego. He imported the spot to the US after consumers -- including, he said, his wife -- received overseas versions of it from friends by e-mail.
"It's an effort to show consumers, in an attention-getting way, that tuna, and Chicken of the Sea, fit into a healthy lifestyle," Signorino said.
The commercial is being shown, or soon will be, on networks including ABC, CBS, HGTV and Oxygen, he added, and will be circulated through e-mail. The spot is adapted from the original version created by an agency in Bangkok, Thailand, named Chaiyo. Monsarrat said the Nike campaign, which is also to appear on a Web site (nikewomen.com), is in keeping with her company's efforts, dating back more than a decade, to address issues about women's self-images in a positive way, without stereotypes.
She cited campaigns that carried themes like, "This is not a goddess" and, "If you let me play," all of which were inten-ded, she said, to be "honest in how we communicate with our target consumer."
Nike was not alone in the 1990s in running ads meant to question the conventional wisdom about images of women in advertising. In 1997, the Body Shop gained international attention for a campaign carrying the theme, "Love your body," which featured a Rubenesque plastic doll named Ruby. The print ads and posters showed the voluptuous, even zaftig, Ruby reclining on a sofa under this headline: "There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only eight who do."
"Advertising sometimes starts trends, and sometimes it follows trends," Kaplan Thaler said.
Even if they do not turn up in ads, "real women have always been here, are here and continue to be here," she added. "I'm always happy to see advertising that does not dictate a norm none of us can achieve."
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