Iconic Ads: Dove “Real Beauty”
“Since 2004, Real Beauty has challenged how women are represented in the media, highlighting digital distortion, and encouraging the beauty industry and society at large to face up to the harmful impact unrealistic depictions have on women and girls. And in a crowded beauty landscape, it’s helped Dove win consumers’ loyalty and affection.” Unilever Website 2024
This year, the Dove brand celebrates the 20th year of Dove’s Real Beauty global advertising campaign.
The campaign was developed by Ogilvy, the ad agency that worked with Unilever to launch the Dove Beauty Bar in 1957.
According to Maureen Sherriff, the group creative director at the time, “the brief for the original work was to create a mission for Dove that stood above all the product ads, and which would also ‘widen the definition of beauty.’” Ad Age, April 10, 2024
In many respects, the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, was the millennial heir to more than 60 years of promising women a personal beauty experience. The earliest Dove campaigns stressed the fact that the Dove Beauty Bar could help maintain beautiful skin. The notion of caring for one’s skin was shown as a positive, even pleasurable, experience. The ads suggested that personal care was a gift to oneself. The Real Beauty campaign took that notion of self care much further: it challenged women to see themselves as beautiful.
The Real Beauty Campaign:
“When Dove launched the ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’ in 2004, it was in response to the findings of a major study, The Real Truth About Beauty: A Global Report, which had revealed that only 2% of women around the world would describe themselves as beautiful. To highlight the unrealistic beauty standards placed on women, ‘Evolution’, created by Ogilvy, showed a time-lapse sequence of a model being prepared for a shoot, capturing the reality of the amount of time and work it takes a whole team of people to make her billboard-ready. “ The Drum, June 14, 2022
While the Real Beauty campaign delivered excellent business results, the campaign also had an immediate cultural impact.
Effie “Real Beauty” Case Study
This assessment of the “Real Beauty” campaign is part of a 10-part series featuring key learnings and lessons from Gold Effie-winning case studies. The series was produced by Effie Worldwide in partnership with Dr. Mark Ritson and Linkedin Marketing Solutions.