A Dove Chocolate Ad Romanticised Cheating - and the Shanghai Store Behind It Was Fined RMB 800,000

A short video ad for a Dove chocolate gift box has cost the Shanghai company behind it an RMB 800,000 fine. Regulators said the ad presented romantic unfaithfulness as a sweet experience.

The Ad

The video told the story of a woman whose boyfriend had never bought her the Dove gift box she wanted. While he was away, she shared the moment with another man she was flirting with — who drove two hours to bring her the gift box. The caption called it “so sweet.”

In the ad’s own words: “I asked my boyfriend for the Dove rainbow gift box for ages and he never bought it. Today, while he’s away, I shared it with the guy I’m flirting with — he drove two hours to bring it over. So sweet.”

Who Was Fined

The penalty fell on Shanghai Zongzheng Food Co., Ltd., the company that operates the Dove flagship store on Kuaishou, the short-video shopping platform. The company designed, produced and posted the promotion itself in August 2026 to sell Dove’s colourful chocolate gift box.

Why It Was Fined

Shanghai’s Putuo District market regulator ruled that the ad dressed up unfaithfulness as a “sweet experience,” promoting the wrong values about love and marriage and violating good social customs. The fine was imposed under China’s Advertising Law in October 2026.

The case was made public on November 12, when market regulators from Shanghai, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui jointly published twelve typical illegal-advertising cases from across the Yangtze River Delta. The Dove case was listed first — and its RMB 800,000 fine was the largest of the twelve.

Dove Had Already Apologised

Long before the fine was announced, the ad had already set off a public backlash. On August 25, Dove apologised, saying a third-party store team had created and published the video without strictly following the brand’s content-review procedures. The brand added that, since the video had gone out through Dove’s official channel, it bore responsibility for it.

The episode is a reminder that in China, advertising is not judged on creativity alone. An ad that treats cheating as a joke can be treated as a legal violation — and, in this case, an expensive one.

Source: Beijing Daily / Chang’an Street Governor; case details from the Shanghai Market Regulation WeChat account.