Real Beauty Sketches
Dove (Unilever)2013
Real Beauty Sketches is a 2013 online film for Dove, created by Ogilvy & Mather, Brazil (São Paulo).
The line
You are more beautiful than you think.
Why it works
A social experiment as advertising: a forensic sketch artist draws women twice, sight unseen — once from their own self-description, once from a stranger's. The strangers' portraits are consistently more beautiful, and the women confront the gap. Built on Dove's research statistic that only 4% of women consider themselves beautiful, it was posted in April 2013 and became, per Guinness World Records, the most viewed online video advertisement ever at the time — 124.8 million views in 25 languages within seven months, with 3 billion media impressions in its first ten days. It won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes 2013. It is studied for emotion engineered from methodology (the experiment is the script) and as the scaled-up culmination of the Real Beauty platform that began with 'Evolution.'
Techniques
- Pathos Women confronting the gap between their own harsh self-descriptions and a stranger's kinder view of them make the tagline land emotionally.
- Logos The experiment supplies its own evidence, as strangers' sketches are consistently more beautiful, backing research that few women consider themselves beautiful.
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