With ‘text to speech’ technology becoming incredibly advanced and common place in social media apps, its popularity has soared among users. Allowing people to generate realistic voiceovers for their videos. It’s a trend that has really taken off, with one AI voice becoming overwhelmingly popular - a female American voice that’s super happy and positive, no matter what you make it say. Our brief was to inform parents and raise awareness of how this technology is being used to spread toxic beauty ideals and procedures to the most vulnerable of people young children. The demographic who uses these social media apps are inherently young and impressionable, so these voices hold even more power to influence, and negatively impact their mental health. As the leading provider of self-esteem, Dove aims to drive parents to their resources, helping protect more kids from harmful content, and empowering them to have a positive self-image.

Casting was more than a little unusual for this campaign, as our main voiceover artist wasn’t human. Instead we had to cast from a pool of AI voices. We engaged an advanced text-to-speech AI voice representing what young people hear on their social feeds every day. We prototyped the scripts using a stock AI voice, before casting for our final voice that mirrored the high energy, high positivity read of popular social media voices like ‘Jessie’. We could only consider voices that were available to license for commercial use too, so that led us to ‘Sarah’. We then selected the intonation and read that would give us the level of expression that the scripts needed to deliver on that familiar sounding voice. Once we’d cast our AI voice, we then cast a distinctive regional female voiceover to contrast sharply by giving the brand a warm reassuring and very human feel.

The campaign has only recently launched so it’s too early to measure the true impact just yet. However, we hope this work can have a lasting effect on parents, helping to keep more children away from the harmful content we are highlighting. We launched the campaign on Heart Radio the no.1 commercial, station in the UK, with a strong listener demographic of parents. Their total listenership reaches 1,875,000 million every week, but we were careful to buy slots that would play outside of when children might be listening. In terms of brand perception, this campaign seeks to follow in the footsteps of our previous campaigns. Solidifying Dove’s position as advocates for the self-esteem of young girls and children, which now goes back over 15 years.