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Real Beauty
Isn't it time to redefine beauty?
What is the Real Beauty The Dove Campaign for Real Beauty is a worldwide marketing campaign launched by Unilever in 2004 that includes advertisements, video, workshops, sleepover events and the publication of a book and the production of a play. The aim of the campaign is to celebrate the natural physical variation embodied by all women and inspire them to have the confidence to be comfortable with themselves.
Real women with real bodies. One beautiful image says a thousand words. In 2005, Dove set out to debunk the stereotypes that only thin is beautiful.
Evolution The nearly two-minute "Evolution" viral video by Ogilvy & Mather, Toronto, was the campaign's first big breakthrough, and the first double Grand Prix winner in the history of the International Advertising Festival at Cannes in 2007.
It aimed to show that our standards of beauty are all out of whack, which they are, and it did. But the real real beauty of the spot, and the real evolution, was in its provenance: It began on the web. "Evolution" was an online viral ad, streamed and downloaded millions of times before it ever made its way on TV. In fact, TV was an afterthought -most likely one to make the ad eligible for the film Grand Prix, which, as a mere online trifle, it otherwise would not have been.
Onslaught Dove followed "Evolution" in 2007 with "Onslaught," also by Ogilvy, Toronto, showing a little girl bombarded by media images seemingly designed to make her insecure about her looks. The ad drew fewer awards and more criticism, including a long-running social-media meme accusing Unilever of hypocrisy for also making Axe ads showing sexcrazed model-esque women.
Pro Age Dove caught more flack in 2008 with Ogilvy ads featuring barely covered older female models to back its launch of Pro-Age products. Controversy flared when a professional photo retoucher told a New Yorker reporter he'd done work on photos for the campaign by the famed Annie Leibovitz.
Sketches
"Real Beauty Sketches" debuted on April 14— eight years after Ogilvy Toronto's hit "Evolution" campaign. This spot not only impressed, but also tugged at heartstrings. In it, an FBI sketch artist asked individual women participating in a study to either describe themselves or a stranger seated next to them earlier in the day.
The results showed very different images — the self-descriptions would reveal the women's insecurities. The clip juxtaposed the two descriptions to highlight the distorted-- inaccurate and less attractive -- verbal pictures women painted of themselves. In May, it took the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity's highest honor— the titanium Grand Prix — a prize only awarded for innovative and transformational work. In November, Unilever topped our Awards Report Chart.
Selfie At the Sundance Film Festival on Jan. 19, Dove was set to recognize the campaign's 10th anniversary with the debut of "Selfie," an eight-minute film by Academy Award-winning documentary director Cynthia Wade. In the film, a photographer teaches high-school girls and their moms to boost their confidence and expand their views of what beauty is by taking self portraits with their smartphones and posting them on social media.
But the real beauty seems to be aging well It's been 10 years since Unilever's Dove launched its groundbreaking "Campaign for Real Beauty." It's won a plethora of ad awards and sold a heap of product -- sales have jumped to $4 billion today from $2.5 billion in its inaugural year.
Isn't it time to redefine The Real Beauty?