When Dove launched the pioneering ‘Campaign For Real Beauty’ 10 years ago, portrayal of female beauty in magazines was arguably the biggest influence on self-esteem and body confidence among young women and girls. So when Dove eliminated conventional models and the use of photoshop from its communications, it sparked a behaviour change in the beauty marketing industry. A decade later, the way media influences young women’s body confidence and self-esteem has changed. Dove’s research shows that the ‘mirrors’ for young women and girls are now comments, ‘likes’ and ‘thumbs up’ in social media. In Dove’s own research, 67% of young women say these shape the way they feel about their own appearance. Dove also found that Twitter is the most popular platform for beauty comments, that women are twice as likely to tweet something negative as positive about themselves, and that negative comments tend to peak around red carpet events. So in 2015, Dove set its sights on changing the tone of the beauty conversation on Twitter on ‘Oscars night’ (February 22) when negative beauty comment volumes peak.

#SpeakBeautiful launched on Twitter on Oscars night. Dove also advertised during the show, sharing powerful data about the prevalence of critical beauty terms on Twitter – in real time – to encourage users to change the conversation with #SpeakBeautiful. Dove partnered with Twitter to create a custom algorithm. It was developed to identify negative tweets so Dove’s team of Community Managers could counter them with positives. When users posted a self-critical comment, the algorithm identified it using keywords such as ‘ugly’ and Dove connected and responded to encourage a change of behaviour.

Dove drove a radical change of tone on Twitter. There were 30% fewer critical tweets on Oscars night 2015 compared to 2014, and 69% more positive about ‘self’ beauty. From February 19-28, there were 411,000 tweets mentioning #SpeakBeautiful – 52,000 in the first four days. Dove outperformed all other Oscars advertisers on engagement. With 5.9 million tweets, 801 million social media impressions and a unique audience of 3 million, Dove is in a position to help reduce negativity on social media, help women be more confident in their own beauty and re-establish the brand as a thought leader in this area.