This campaign is relevant for Creative Strategy because it shows how the planning process can build, maintain, and reinvigorate even the biggest brands. Reverse Selfie took a brand that was showing signs of staleness and updated its long-term idea to fit with a changing world. This was achieved thanks to strategic rigour and cultural insight.

The result was a campaign that started a cultural conversation, generating mass awareness for the issue and the Dove Self-Esteem Project. The campaign drove 6bn+ impressions, reasserted Dove’s role in challenging beauty standards and created significant commercial value driving huge growth in cross category sales.

Dove, in the US, has been at the forefront of the self-esteem and beauty conversation since the Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004. But by 2020, things had changed. Other brands were encroaching on Dove’s position, and beauty had moved to social media.

The beauty world was now faster moving and more judgemental and Dove was nowhere to be seen. We needed to re-establish Dove’s authority and challenge today’s culture of unrealistic beauty standards through the Dove Self-Esteem Project (DSEP). We knew the rise in social media usage correlated with falling beauty confidence; Our strategic challenge was to understand why.

Despite our efforts, Dove hadn’t created the change in beauty needed. Women’s confidence in their beauty had fallen dramatically from 85% to 50% in 5 years. 6 in 10 girls and women blamed social media for making them feel worse about themselves, exacerbated by the burden to present the perfect image 24/7, the pressure was inescapable.

The result was that brand equity measures were starting to slip. We were losing brand distinctiveness, an early-warning sign of an oncoming decline in sales and awareness of Dove Self-Esteem Project was at 17%.

We needed to answer the question; What does ‘Real Beauty’ mean in a world of social media lenses, filters, face-tuning, and ring-light selfies?

Our aim was to regain our leadership voice and update our POV on the emerging, social media driven beauty world. We needed to make the DSEP relevant again and prove that purpose could also be profitable.

Despite our belief that social media was creating a harmful beauty environment, many teens felt it positively impacted their self-image. To uncover the truth, we commissioned a survey into girls social-media and selfie habits.

We found 80% of girls had distorted the way they look online using retouching apps by age 13. These apps were pressuring girls into altering images to the point they were hardly recognisable.

Selfies were now the biggest threat to self-esteem. This level of distortion was causing selfie dysmorphia, a rise in cosmetic surgery, and had been cited as the lead cause of an increase in teen suicides. We needed to impact selfie-culture but also to avoid alienating our target audience of mothers and their daughters.

Our strategy was to reveal the lengths girls go in manipulating selfies and ask parents to have conversations with their daughters about social media with our Dove Self-Esteem Project toolkit.

Our creative idea was to show the damage these retouching apps can do to self-esteem by updating the award-winning 2004 Dove film ‘Evolution’ in reverse, showing the impact of using retouching apps to manipulate selfies.

We used TV to reach millions of parents in the US, demonstrating the harm of retouching apps and showing the damage they could cause to teenagers.

With such a contentious subject, authenticity was essential. We cast young girls, not-actors, who used retouching apps regularly. We had them use the same techniques they use day to retouch their selfies. Our launch film ran in reverse, ending by emphasizing our girl’s true beauty.

Impactful OOH used split portraits mirroring the aesthetics of retouching apps, allowing us to show selfies that were natural on one side while heavily manipulated on the other.

Grammy Award-winning superstar Lizzo supported the campaign by posting an unfiltered naked selfie, igniting the conversation.

The campaign was Dove's most successful, achieving 6bn global impressions, with 3.2bn in the US. It garnered 147 US media placements achieving 1.9bn impressions in the first two days (exceeding our 1.4bn benchmark).

Lizzo's post received 2mn likes in 24h, becoming her second most liked post of 2021.

In the US, the campaign let to an increased brand power of +5%, resulting in 11.9% increase in cross-category value sales, giving us a 1:4.5 ROI. Amongst those exposed to the campaign, favourability increased +19%, affinity +21%, and increases in Dove's key brand purpose measure of 'inspires women to feel positive about the way they look' +8% from 50% to 58%.

Growth in awareness of DSEP surpassed all our benchmarks, increasing from 17% to 67%, with weekly toolkit downloads reaching 42,690, +4000%.

We also saw a personal impact in an email from a mother thanking us for raising such an important issue.

Dove’s vision, “to make beauty a source of confidence, not anxiety for women and girls everywhere” has been our brand purpose since the Campaign for Real Beauty in 2004. A key part of delivering on this, is to back up our words with actions. The Dove Self-Esteem Project (DSEP) is our mission to help “girls build positive body confidence and self-esteem.” The project provides educational resources to help them learn to love their bodies.

Dove’s brand campaigns are designed to raise awareness of DSEP to help achieve this goal. But Reverse Selfie went a step further, highlighting a key issue that was negatively impacting the self-esteem of girls. The work of DSEP was unable to stem the tide of falling body-confidence levels in the wake of social media. It was no longer enough to just raise awareness of DSEP. We had to call out toxic beauty practices to affect

The US has the 3rd biggest usage of social media globally, however many Americans have started to question whether its positives outweigh the emerging negatives. A recent study found that 64% of Americans say social media has had a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the US today. The issue is even more contentious when it comes to young people. The state of Utah recently introduced measures to effectively ban social media usage for under 18s, while Joe Biden described social media as an ongoing experiment being undertaken upon the nation’s young people.

It was in this environment that our campaign launched, showing one example of how social media was damaging the confidence & self-esteem of young girls.