The brilliant ad-heads at Dove and Ogilvy & Mather are at it again with the launch of their latest campaign “Waking Up Hannah” , a choose your own adventure-type comedy featuring a twenty-something female protagonist who bears an eerie resemblance to a young (and equally grating) Rachel Ray. According to Dove brand building manager Barbra Owens, “Girls in their 20s are often dealing with a lot of pressure...It’s really about helping wake up and get a fresh perspective on what’s going on”. As one of their target twenty-somethings, this immediately piqued my narcissistic interests. Excited that they might want to join my pity party, I decided to pay Hannah a visit. Choose your own adventure books were my fave, and I do like smelling pretty when I get out of the shower. I hit play. Hey, that looks like my last Saturday night out. Everyone likes a party girl. Except she has an iphone and I don’t; point one against Hannah, but only because I’m jealous. Hannah’s day seems to be determined by the scent her viewer selects for her shower; a bit of a stretch if you ask me, but I plod along. Alas, that was only the beginning and soon I find my brain stretched like the Laffy Taffy I’m gnawing on for lunch (they do fail to highlight the poor eating habits of the twenty-something). Perhaps the breaking point comes when she tells off her boss in order to attend her blind date. I fear I’m too mature for Hannah, which sends me into a bit of a self-reflective panic spiral that I’m not enjoying my life enough for Dove to tell me to “wake up and get a fresh perspective”. I shut that panic spiral up by a swig from the flask of girly flavoured vodka I keep in my all-nighter stash at work, right next to my Dove deodorant. As a lead-in to the ad launch, the undeniable success of the previous Ogilvy & Mather “real beauty” efforts have helped create buzz for this campaign. The real test however will be Dove’s ability to re-connect with its target demographic, a group otherwise objectified by Axe, their sister company. The significance of this controversy has not been tested on a new campaign, and the results will be interesting. Waking Up Hannah is well intentioned, but after all, it’s just a soap opera.