The harmful advice, trends and products promoted by toxic influencers are creating a self-esteem crisis among teenage girls: 92% want to change the way they look, and 1 in 2 girls follow an influencer that makes them feel less confident. Our brief was twofold: firstly, to highlight the scale and harm of toxic trends across social platforms for parents, who are often unaware of what their daughters are seeing; and secondly, to help girls recognize and avoid toxic advice online. Tragically, toxic advice has now become so common, girls don’t even realize it’s toxic anymore. Our goal was to create a single, shareable film that would be relatable for both parents and their teen daughters, which spotlighted the issue as well as educating parents about resources from the Dove Self-Esteem Project they could use to help their daughters detoxify their feed.

Toxic beauty advice and toxic influencers are causing a self-esteem crisis in teenage girls worldwide. 1 in 2 girls follow influencers that make them feel less confident, and 92% of teen girls want to change the way they look. Tragically, toxic advice has now become so common, girls don’t even realise it’s toxic anymore. Our idea was to use deepfake technology to put the words of toxic influencers – words heard every day by young girls – into the mouths of the one person they trust most in the world: their mom. This enabled us to expose the issue and alert parents to toxic trends across social platforms, and at the same time help girls recognize and avoid toxic advice online. The film ends with a rallying call for parents to support their girls and leads viewers to Dove Self-Esteem Project resources, to help them detoxify their daughters’ social feeds.

Our audience surveying revealed a troubling disconnect between parents and the online content their daughters consume: 40% of mothers could not name one influencer their daughter follows. Social media algorithms that feed young girls toxic beauty advice are showing parents completely different content on the same platforms. Our strategy began with an insight true to all parents: you would never let your daughter hear harmful things in her own home. But it happens on social media every day. By highlighting the ubiquity of toxic trends and influencers on social media, we made it clear that toxic advice is prevalent and ensured parents didn’t feel shamed or accused of not doing enough. Through audience surveying, we discovered that of 59% of girls have felt better after unfollowing idealized beauty content from social media influencers. This led to our call to action: for parents to help their daughters detoxify their feeds.

The social experiment was constructed in a three-week timeframe from the completion of the casting process. Once the facial and auditory data had been gathered, we quickly worked to build five hyper-realistic deepfakes that looked and sounded exactly like the mothers. Utilizing comprehensive social listening ensured our representation of girls’ experience online was true-to-life and relatable. We tracked fifty toxic trends in real-time across multiple social platforms, inputting them into our deepfake models two days before the experiment to ensure relevance. Finally, with natural processing AI, we built transcripts for the deepfakes based on the most popular phrases of hundreds of toxic influencers, ensuring that the deepfake moms spoke just like the influencers their daughters follow. The campaign launched in the US, Canada, UK & Brazil in late April 2022; it will then roll out in fourteen other supporting markets across LATAM, EU and South Africa.

Immediately, the film was organically covered by media and television outlets across the world and went viral on three continents. In the first ten days, the campaign achieved 13.6 million organic views in the USA, UK, Canada and Brazil, 1.6 billion earned impressions in the USA alone, and has a 99% positive campaign sentiment, which is especially impressive given the toxicity of the subject matter and the use of controversial deepfake technology. The campaign has driven millions of parents to digital tools and a downloadable Confidence Kit on the Dove Self-Esteem Project website, where average dwell time in the week after the film launch increased by 100% to over four minutes. Our largest market (USA) has only run 2% of its paid media to date, with the campaign running until end August. It is currently on pace to become Dove’s most viewed and most successful purpose-led campaign in history.