Dove Photoshop Action

Background

Dove wanted to increase brand affinity by building on its ‘Real Beauty’ campaign. This included helping 96% of women who didn’t consider themselves beautiful to find happiness in how they looked. They also wanted to reignite positive conversation around ‘Real Beauty’ and to increase their Twitter following.

Idea

The brand set out to talk directly to those responsible for manipulating
the perception of beauty – retouchers, designers, art directors and publishers. The intention was to turn these professional photoshoppers into influencers, who would spread the conversation through social media.

A tool was designed to appeal to Photoshop artists called Photoshop Action. It could be downloaded with a single click. Its ‘Beautify’ app purported to add a natural glow to flesh tones.

It was uploaded to forums used by retouchers and it was not long before designers discovered they had been had. What Photoshop Action did was to reverse the previous unsaved manipulations, alterations and cosmetic ‘improvements’ that had been made to the image.

When the photo reverted to its original, unretouched state, a message appeared on-screen asking the photoshopper to reconsider beauty. 

Results

The ‘Trojan Horse’ idea was almost immediately heralded as ‘brilliant’, ‘innovative’ and, yes, even ‘sneaky’. But it did get people talking about real beauty. The video had had over 1.3 million views after four months, had garnered over 81 million impressions and had made the front page of Mashable, with a full-page article in the Globe & Mail, an article in the National Post and reviews in hundreds of blogs across the world. There was a 40% growth in Twitter followers (one of the highest spikes in new Twitter followers in brand history). It received a 92% positive sentiment ranking, surpassing Dove’s own lofty expectations. These results were especially meaningful given the small budget and the fact that no media dollars were put behind the project. 

Our Thoughts

This idea has been rather overshadowed by the ‘Dove Sketches’ campaign, which, at one stage looked set for a billion views.

Personally, I find more to applaud in this idea from Ogilvy Canada than in the Police forensic artist viral from Ogilvy Brazil, which has always bothered me. What ‘Sketches’ does is simply highlight the problem (that only 4% of women consider themselves beautiful). It scratches the sore.

This, on the other hand, reveals why women may lack self-esteem and suggests how the problem might be tackled, by talking to the manipulators rather than to the manipulated.

While we’re on the subject, of course only a tiny percentage of women will actually say they are beautiful. The other 96% are neither vain nor arrogant.

And, finally, the whole viral Dove thing started with Ogilvy in Toronto, with the brilliant ‘Evolution’ film of 2007. It must be irritating for them to have their thunder stolen by a sister agency, doing a lesser job.