Dove Real Beauty Sketches

This Ad was released a few months ago, but after watching it, I knew it had to be posted.

For the first part of the video, I thought this was just about an FBI trained forensic artists’ ability to sketch out a persons face; with that person behind a curtain describing their features. I was really puzzled how they were going to try and tie Dove to a sketch artist’s ability.

It moved on to numerous people also describing to the sketch artist the features of a stranger they met prior to the sketch.

At the end, people are shown two different sketches side by side; the first sketch is how they described themselves and the second sketch, is the strangers descriptions.

The stranger’s descriptions were regularly more stereotypically attractive and similar to what the subjects actually looked like.

With this Ad, Dove was trying to prove that women really do  see themselves dramatically different compared to what other people see them as.

Dove Real Beauty Sketches Ad:

• The most watched online ad ever, according to Unilever, with over 163 million views globally
• 4.6 billion media impressions; reached 275,000 followers on Google+
• #1 on the Cannes YouTube Ads Leaderboard and won Titanium Grand Prix at 2013 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity

Why did this Ad do so well?

It did a great job of using  emotion.  You can literally see the tears in the women’s eyes when they saw the second sketch. Which elicited a strong emotional response from viewers.

David Waterhouse, the global head of content and PR at viral tracker Unruly Media agrees that this video received an intense emotional response of ‘warmth, ‘happiness’ and ‘knowledge’ from its target demographic —which is one of the key factors behind a video’s sharing success.

I loved the message at the end “You are more beautiful than you think”.