Veronica Benini

Veronica Benini

Veronica Benini

Titolare, Stiletto Academy

Italy

The female model in advertisement is getting out of control, becoming a standard and photoshopped body that makes women feel inadequate.
The last 3 generations think they’re fat and don’t allow themselves to act and do what they would since their image seems to be the most important quality instead of education and behaviour. They are ashamed of their bodies, and ashamed of theirselves.
The world has changed and women do not relay anymore on a good marriage to survive, nor in youth and beauty to find a husband. Youth, beauty and marriage are not mandatory qualities to have a successful life anymore since we are finally independent, but our society and marketing keep carrying forward that concept, with the negative sense of guilt through concepts like ageing, being fat and staying single.
Marketing campaigns base all their communication on these three (why ashaming?) concepts that do not reflect our contemporary world anymore. We can be whatever we like to be, and do whatever we want to do, but even if we know it, we do not allow ourselves to do it since we feel ashamed by our own bodies.
There is a way to start a better advertisement, and it will occur from the bottom Up: our choices as mass market, our responses on social media to brands that do not respect us, by our buying choices. Everyone of us, adult and empowering entrepreneurs, can bring this campaign by communicating and empowering women around us, with our daily exemple of not being passive, with our voices that can raise in an elegant but powerful way to make BIG MARKETING understand that embracing empowering advertising makes a better bond and sells more.
I am 40 years old, and we are the first generation that has the power to hire other women because w erule our own companies. It is our duty to carry on a powerful message based on our actions and choices, not our bodies, onsocial media and towards our entourage. It is our duty to show ourselves powerfully ageing, powerfully curvy, powerfully single, powerfully happy. And we need to show this not because this is the only way to be (because there is no model for normality), but because the only model out there is to be thin, in a happy relationship and forever young. And this is unbearable.
Normality is large, vaste and so diverse. Let’s show it and empower new generations to bet on their own education and choices, instead of the neverending query of looking pretty to find a man.
Italians have soft curves and we are mostly pear-shaped. We eat pasta and our gastronomy is one of the healthiest of the world, but advertising bodies makes us feel fat. Italian women deny pasta and welcome proteic diets, which are unhealthy in the long term. We deny our bodies, our culture, and feel constantly unsatisfied. We talk about insatisfying bodies several times a day like it was normal to feel bad about ourselves.
From the bottom Up is a double sense claim: start loving your bottom, and start to rise your voice on social media against diseducating ad campaigns. The bottom of the market ecosystem is made by us. And we are millions of bottoms.