DOVE
One of the biggest conceptual ad campaigns of the
decade grew out of a photography exhibit in a retail
building in Toronto. ¶ “Beyond Compare: Women
Photographers On Real Beauty,” a show organized
by Dove and Ogilvy & Mather, featured work from
67 female photographers including Annie Leibovitz,
Tierney Gearon and Peggy Sirota. And it marked the
beginning of Dove’s quest to understand how women
thought about beauty — a conversation that would
eventually become the Dove Campaign For Real Beauty.
Ten years after the exhibition
opened, the Campaign For Real
Beauty is one of modern marketing’s most talked-about success
stories. The campaign has expanded from billboards to television
ads and online videos: The 2006
video, Evolution, went viral before
“viral” was even a thing. (After
all, YouTube had only launched
the year before.) And Dove’s 2013
spot “Real Beauty Sketches,”
which shows women describing
their appearances to a forensic
sketch artist, became the mostwatched video ad of all time.
How did a brand associated
with a plain white bar of soap get
men and women worldwide to
think about the narrow definitions of female beauty? And does
the fact that this message comes
from a brand owned by Unilever
— the company behind the very
sexily marketed Axe — make it
less authentic or important?
The Start of Something
In the early 2000s, Dove executives began looking for a way to
revive a brand that was being
overshadowed by other companies. Their PR agency, Edelman,
conducted a study of more than
3,000 women in 10 countries in
order to learn about women’s priorities and interests. When it re-
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page: Women
pose for
the Dove
Campaign for
Real Beauty.