A fat slice of the plus-sized pie

This Business 2.0 article is pretty straightforward -- Americans are bigger and hey, guess what, the plus-sized goods and services segment grows. I guess if Americans are going to be overweight anyhow, it's a good thing that they'll now be able to buy seatbelt extenders, right?

The later paragraphs yielded an interesting update on those Dove ads that generated so much controversy all the way back then though:

Other companies have tackled the challenges of marketing products for the
obese using traditional Madison Avenue savvy. Last year Unilever plastered New
York and several other U.S. cities with ads for new Dove skin-firming creams
that featured women flaunting their curves in bras and panties. Lost to many
consumers was the fact that the models were smaller than the average adult woman
is today.
"So you're celebrating who you are--but selling an anticellulite
cream?" says Mira Kaddoura, an executive at ad agency Wieden & Kennedy.
"That's weird." Maybe. But it works. According to Information Resources, Dove's
sales jumped more than 12 percent in the United States--far outpacing growth in
its category. Those results suggest that plus-size consumers, like the rest of
us, respond better to pretty portraits of themselves in ads than to what they
see in the bathroom mirror.

Even an ad agency executive sees the queasy contradition within the Dove ads.