Dove's mission is to make every woman feel beautiful. Dove conducted a worldwide study with The London School of Economics that revealed only 4% of women describe themselves as beautiful.Our challenge was to address this problem of low self-esteem while building affinity for the brand.We identified a major barrier to self-esteem: negative advertising online, which is designed to target women's insecurities by picking up keywords in user content. We empowered women to remove that barrier with The Ad Makeover campaign, enabling users to displace negative ads with positive messages.

The application uses Facebook’s ad auction API and bids double the suggested amount for those keywords, ensuring a positive message is most likely to win.The campaign combined social media, paid media, PR, media buying, key-word search, web development and traditional advertising in a groundbreaking way, resulting in 71% women polled feeling more beautiful after the campaign.

First we ignited discussion about negative banners with Dove’s fans on Facebook and email. Then we used these channels to directly invite women to solve the problem with the Ad Makeover application. The app uses Facebook’s ad auction API, and bids double the suggested amount for keywords used to target insecurities, ensuring that positive messages are most likely to win. The campaign turns a media channel often used for negative communications, into a source of positivity. It puts Dove’s media spend entirely in the hands of women, letting them both create and distribute the content they want to see. The campaign is social by design and only works if users respond to the call-to-action to displace negative ads themselves.

During the campaign Dove dominated 82% of the beauty conversation in social, with 80% positive sentiment. And the majority of the conversation was around Dove's key brand message of self-esteem.