Reverse Selfie

Why it works

Fifteen years after 'Evolution' exposed how advertising manufactured beauty, Dove showed that the retouching had moved into teenagers' own hands. 'Reverse Selfie' plays a social-media post backwards: what looks like a young woman's selfie is undone, tweak by tweak and filter by filter, until the person behind it is revealed as a girl barely into her teens. Directed by Benito Montorio for Ogilvy UK and released in April 2021, the 60-second film recreated every edit from the apps its young cast really used, and came with portrait posters and a Self-Esteem Project confidence kit to help parents and teachers have 'the Selfie Talk'. Dove called it a sequel to 'Evolution'. It is studied as a brand updating its own landmark argument for the social-media era and pairing awareness with a practical tool. The One Show entry cites 6 billion impressions, 66.3 million teenagers reached on TikTok and a 2,650% jump in kit downloads in week one. In 2022 it won two One Show Gold Pencils and two D&AD Yellow Pencils.