With only 10 days and minimal paid media support, our women’s grapevine strategy spread real beauty conversation to billions:

3 billion media impressions (all original content)

Viewed more than any ad on Youtube in the whole of 2012

Featured on global mass media broadcast and newspapers

All leading to unprecedented levels of sharing and engagement:

Most shared link in mashable.com history

Responsible for more than 90% of video content shares within it's peer group category.

1.9 million aggregate shares on Facebook

Brand passion increased 1000%.

Parodies

Right now, some woman, somewhere, is watching this film and feeling better about herself.

To spread the campaign to women around the world over we needed to use the most talkative, contagious, fast-moving, sharable medium out there: women themselves.

To harness the power of the woman to woman grapevine we needed 3 things: reach, conversation and amplification.

For reach, a global partnership with YouTube’s TrueView platform was optimized across 20 key regions, ensuring views across countries, maximized on efficiency and consumer engagement.

To ignite conversation, we uploaded the video to youtube and shared with Dove’s 14 million Facebook fans. Promoted tweets & trends were run on Twitter. While paid and owned posts made sure the video was seen and shared all over Facebook, resulting in 1 in 10 users seeing the video in their newsfeed.

And finally, highly targeted search cleaned up interest generated by the massive PR and outreach campaign.

The biggest barrier to women feeling beautiful is their own self-perception. Only 4% of women believe they’re beautiful. How could we inspire the other 96% to feel the same?

Our strategy was to conduct an experiment that would provoke women, and the world around them, to discuss, reconsider, and rethink real beauty and self-perception.

We invited an FBI-trained sketch artist to draw a women’s portrait according to their own self-description. We then asked him to sketch portraits of the same women according to strangers’ descriptions of them. Throughout, the artist never laid eyes on the women themselves.

To close we held an exhibition comparing the portraits. Women admitted that portraits based on the strangers’ description were more beautiful, happier and accurate.

The film provided striking proof that women are more beautiful than they think.