The levels of digital distortion young people see online is harming their self-esteem, and 80% of girls are now using retouching apps themselves by the age of 13.

Following an unprecedented year of increased screen-time, there had never been a more important time to act.

We had to tackle head on the toxic beauty standards that girls are having to live up to and stop these dangerous retouching apps from blurring the confidence of young people.

As the leading provider of self-esteem worldwide, the Dove Self-Esteem Project is aiming to build self-esteem and positive body image in young people with the ambition of reaching 250 million young people globally by 2030.

Our creative idea was to show the damage these retouching apps can do to the self-esteem of our young people. What girls are really doing to themselves and their faces. By showing the reversal of the toxic practices retouching apps use to manipulate the images of our young people.

The campaign launched in the USA and got picked up by the mainstream media immediately. It then went on to launch in more than 20 different countries, creating global awareness of this new danger to self-esteem.

The campaign went on to receive 6 billion earned impressions globally, including reaching 66.3 million on TikTok alone, through our #NoDigitalDistortion challenge. The campaign had tremendous industry impact and acclaim at a time when the mental health of young people was top of the cultural agenda.

Despite our belief that social media was creating a harmful beauty environment, many teens felt it had a positive impact on self-image. We conducted bespoke survey and focus group research to better understand both parents’ social media understanding, as well as girls’ perspective on social media. Filters and photo-editing apps were pressuring girls into altering their images to the point they were hardly recognisable. It was no longer the beauty industry, but social media’s perfectly curated selfies setting today’s unrealistic beauty standards and damaging girls’ self-esteem. We had to impact selfie-culture but do it in a way that didn’t alienate our target audience of mothers or their daughters. Our strategy was to reveal the unknown lengths that girls go to in manipulating their selfies, raising awareness of the social media pressures and asking parents to have conversations with their daughters about social media with our Dove Self-Esteem Project accredited toolkit.

We wanted everything about the execution to be authentic to how real girls are retouching their images, but we also wanted to create the emotional arc that would surprise and truly hit home with our audience. To do this we briefed to cast young girls who were non-actors and who use retouching apps and social media daily. We cast between the ages of 9-13 years old; the group most susceptible to the dangers of retouching apps. We then had them use the same techniques they use every day to retouch these new images and make the reveal incredibly impactful.

Once lockdowns had been lifted, the images appeared in busy shopping plazas on large outdoor digital sites, using split portraits and vertical sliders which mirrored the aesthetics of retouching apps. Allowing us to show selfies that on one side were natural and unretouched, while heavily manipulated and distorted on the other.

The campaign ran in 20 countries across the world and achieved 6 billion global impressions.

In the US, where we have more results data available, Reverse Selfie achieved 3.2 billion impressions in the first week. And amongst those exposed to the campaign brand affinity increased +21pp from 44% to 65%. The campaign also drove increases in Dove’s key brand purpose measure of ‘inspire women to feel more positive about the way they look’ +8% from 50% to 58%.

We achieved a major 11.9% increase in cross-category value sales growth with 11.3M more units sold. This correlated to a huge sales uplift of $73.3M, on just a $5.3m media budget.

During launch week, +42,690 toolkits were downloaded by parents having ‘selfie talks’ with children, +4000% from the weekly average of 1,040. Most importantly, +180k US lives were positively impacted, x3.5 that benchmarked.

The campaign even became an educational tool in schools.