The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is a worldwide marketing campaign launched by Unilever in 2004 aiming to build self confidence in women and young children. Dove's partners in the campaign included Ogilvy, Edelman Public Relations, and Harbinger Communications (in Canada) along with other consultants. Part of the overall project was the Evolution campaign.
Campaign
In 2004, Dove and Ogilvy organized a photography exhibit titled "Beyond Compare: Women Photographers on Real Beauty". The show featured work from 67 female photographers which led to the Real Beauty campaign. The Dove Real Beauty campaign was conceived in 2004 during a three-year creative strategic research effort, conducted in partnership with three universities, led by Joah Santos. The creative was conceived by Ogilvy Düsseldorf and London.
The study resulted in a new consumer-centric versus product-centric advertising strategy, which Joah Santos referred to as P.O.V. - Purpose | Objective | Vision. The concept led all of Ad Age top five Campaigns of the Century, increasing sales from $2 billion to $4 billion in three years. The plan abandoned Unilever's traditional brand essence ladder in favor of a POV strategy "To make women feel comfortable in their own skin and to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence rather than anxiety." All Dove Real Beauty advertisements must therefore adhere to the POV strategy, each with its own unique perspective. The original advertising insight/tension indicated that only 2% of women consider themselves beautiful. Ogilvy Düsseldorf and London created it.
The first stage of the campaign centered on a series of billboard advertisements, initially put up in Germany and United Kingdom, and later worldwide. The spots showcased photographs of regular women (in place of professional models), taken by noted portrait photographer Rankin. The ads invited bypassers to vote on whether a particular model was, for example, "Fat or Fab" or "Wrinkled or Wonderful", with the results of the votes dynamically updated and displayed on the billboard itself. Accompanying the billboard advertisements was the publication of the "Dove Report", a corporate study in which Unilever intended to "[create] a new definition of beauty [which] will free women from self-doubt and encourage them to embrace their real beauty."
The series received significant media coverage from talk shows, women's magazines, and mainstream news broadcasts and publications, generating media exposure that Unilever has estimated to be worth more than 30 times the paid-for media space. Following this success, the campaign expanded into other media with a series of television spots (Flip Your Wigs and the Pro-Age series, among others) and print advertisements ("Tested on Real Curves"), culminating in the 2006 Little Girls global campaign, which featured regional versions of the same advertisement in both print and screen, for which Unilever purchased a 30-second spot in the commercial break during Super Bowl XL at an estimated cost of $2.5 million.
In 2006, Ogilvy were seeking to extend the campaign further, by creating one or more viral videos to host on the Campaign for Real Beauty website. The first of these, Daughters, was an interview-style piece intended to show how mothers and daughters related to issues surrounding the modern perception of beauty and the beauty industry. The film, Daughters, touches upon the self-esteem issues found in many young girls today. Dove's Self-Esteem Fund supports their campaign by using statistics that demonstrate how young women and girls are more apt to have distorted views of beauty. It was during the production of Daughters that a series of short films entitled "Beauty Crackdown" was pitched to Unilever as an "activation idea". The concept was one that art director Tim Piper, who proposed to create Evolution with the budget left over from Daughters (C$135,000), pushed. It was originally intended to get people to the Campaign for Real Beauty website to see Daughters, and to participate in the workshops featured on the site. After Evolution, Ogilvy produced Onslaught and Amy. Onslaught is an emotional video about the harsh reality of young girls and the influence that the beauty industry can have on them.