Dove's mission is to make every woman feel beautiful. Dove conducted a worldwide study with The London School of Economics that revealed only 4% of women describe themselves as beautiful.Our challenge was to address this problem of low self-esteem while building affinity for the brand.We identified a major barrier to self-esteem: negative advertising online, which is designed to target women's insecurities by picking up keywords in user content. We empowered women to remove that barrier with The Ad Makeover campaign, enabling users to displace negative ads with positive messages.

The application uses Facebook’s ad auction API and bids double the suggested amount for those keywords, ensuring a positive message is most likely to win.The campaign combined social media, paid media, PR, media buying, key-word search, web development and traditional advertising in a groundbreaking way, resulting in 71% women polled feeling more beautiful after the campaign.

The Ad Makeover became an international success by creating a media debate that fundamentally challenged the use of online advertising. The app used an interface originally designed for marketers to let consumers control the advertising they see for the first time ever. It also created new behaviour: consumers partnered with the brand to publicize the campaign globally.

The campaign earned 253m media impressions in the first week.Users displaced 171m banner ads.Over 50% of women who visited the app created a message.82% of ads seen came from a friend, making it a uniquely social campaign.Global talk about Dove on Facebook increased 41%. Most importantly, 71% of women polled said they feel more beautiful after seeing the campaign, directly delivering on the brand's mission.

First, we ignited the debate about the effect of negative advertising by seeding the topic into the blogosphere and press, via a PR campaign led by Dove. Then we released a video on Facebook and Youtube. Dove's page on Facebook started a conversion about these feel-bad ads. Dove reached out to consumers directly with Facebook messages and personalized emails containing a call to action.

When the app launched, people participated in the campaign around the world. 171,000,000 ads were replaced with positive messages in less than a week. Consumer-generated content rocketed as users tried the app and spread the word through Twitter, blogs, Facebook shares and status updates. Unprecedented online media ensued.