Dove's Reverse Selfie: A very impactful campaign

 

From 1950, Dove has been working with Ogilvy for the marketing of Dove’s brand and especially for Dove’s Campaign of Real Beauty.

After 15 years, “Dove Evolution” film got a Grand Prix winner in Cannes and was recognized as one of the most influential advertising ever.

On April 2021, Dove made a contemporary update of Dove Evolution: “Dove Reverse Selfie”. With this campaign, Ogilvy aimed to drive awareness for the brand, to increase the brand power and understanding that Dove really inspires women to feel good about the way they look.

The video features a 13 years old girl who edited her picture before posting it online. The film plays backwards, it started by the selfie Instagram post of the young girl, then reversed the various changes the girl has made using a filter of an editing application on her mobile. She changed her hair, the shape of her lips and chin, and used makeup products like eyeliner and lip gloss.

In this film Dove focused on the problems of image distortion on the young girls. And, it was run into a mix of channels like Facebook, Youtube, Instagram and Tik Tok using hashtags like #dove #reverseselfie #socialmedia #confidence #retouching #face#theSelfieTalk

The campaign was not only the video, but it was accompanied by a set of photographic posters where we can see the natural faces of girls against the edited versions of the photo of the same girls.

 

The Campaign knew a huge success: 52 000+ views and 17 000+ shares on Facebook, 1.5 million views on YouTube and 870,000+ views on Instagram. The press also responsed positively.

In this campaign Dove targeted not only the young women but also the mothers.

The main objective of this campaign is to stop the damage of the editing apps as it causes a real crisis of confidence due to the social media pressure done on the new generations.

“We need to support the next generation and make them feel confident in who they are and how they look without a filter or photo editing app.” —Ashley Boyce, marketing manager, skin cleansing and Dove masterbrand

Dove shocked the audience with some researches done as the audience found out that 80% of the 13 years old girls said they had to apply a filter or use a retouching app to change the way they look in their photos and 77% tried to change or hide at least one body part/feature before posting their photos on Social media channels

One of the most creative marketing way of Dove’s self-esteem project is that when we access the site, it shows the huge number of reaches of the project: 82 000 000 young people.

Dove also encourages the visitors of the site who want to watch the film, to download the « Confidence Kit” which consists on a resource guide for both parents and teachers.

The campaign results were really impressive: Six billion global impressions, Dove’s ‘brand power’ increased by five per cent, 11.9% increase in cross-category value sales.