One particular brand from Cannes Lions comes to mind for addressing such issues for years under this chapter’s theme of honesty—the skincare brand Dove by Unilever. Let us first take a look at Evolution, the campaign that earned Dove the Grand Prix in the Cyber category for the 2006 Cannes Lions.

The ad uses a one minute, fourteen second time-lapse film to show the transformation of an ordinary woman you might find anywhere into an astonishingly beautiful cover model through makeup, lighting, hairdressers, and digital photoshopping of the resulting image. Dove uses the video to question the standards set by this kind of “fabricated beauty.” The video ends with the message “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted,” purposefully asking viewers whether pursuing such beauty is really the right thing to do. It is a value that is forced on us, and the ad questions if there is any meaning in trying to pursue such ideals and that perhaps it might be better to live life with more self-confidence. At the same time, the campaign serves to declare Dove’s stance in criticizing companies that make money by perpetuating user obsession with such mistaken ideals.

Although this campaign is from 2006, when social media was just taking off and the advertisement and communications industry was slowly starting to recognize the importance of utilizing the internet, it still achieved more than 10 million views on YouTube and drove over 80 times more traffic to the campaign site. Following the Evolution campaign, Dove has constantly cast women who represent real portrayals of the times, keeping to an approach that compares the before and after images of edited beauty that flood our surroundings. Ever since, it has become something of a gimmick used frequently in campaigns all over the world, a kind of “ism” of sorts. However, I do not get the sense that the idea suffers from overuse. The layering of the same scheme tweaked to fit changing environments actually reinforces the core message and makes it more effective. Dove sticks to its principles and bolsters the message by making a series out of a themed approach, while finding ways to prevent the message from sounding tired. That is an impressive endeavor and is indicative of Dove’s sincerity and determination to see the cause through to the end.

Evolution’s success is also partly due to its clever incorporation of a trend at the time that sought to portray reality on the internet, exemplified by Burger King’s Subservient Chicken campaign that gained much attention during the 2004 Cannes Lions. The Subservient Chicken was a website set up to advertise Burger King’s new chicken sandwich product. It parodied the interactive sexcam-type peepshow that porno companies had introduced a few years prior, where users could make online requests for models on live camera to strike various poses. Instead of a porno model, the Burger King site had a man in a lingerie-clad chicken suit who responded to viewer requests. The video game-like, witty concept of this gimmick became an internet sensation, recording 1 million visits on its very first day. Dove’s campaigns also smartly incorporate contemporary insights with a sense of style that makes even similar concepts feel fresh and innovative, deftly stirring up anticipation for the next one.

My hat is off to Dove for maintaining a strong sense of purpose in its endeavors even now in 2023, always accruing more energy for generating new ideas in pursuit of the world it envisions. Seeing as their series of promoting reality has actually resulted in success, it seems evident what a strong message “being honest and sincere with yourself” is in an online environment teeming with overembellished information, and the potential it has for prompting people into action. When looking to acquire new users of a product, it will become increasingly important to not rely excessively on technology and instead engage people with sincerity and no deception.

In order to promote their endeavors, Dove in Canada also runs something called Dove Self-Esteem Workshops on a dedicated Dove Self-Esteem Fund. Self-esteem is difficult to regain once lost, and Dove provides a physical opportunity for helping people face their insecurities and having repeated conversations to find confidence in their true selves. To make sure the corporation as a whole promotes this stance, Dove’s Unilever Canada has shared the video with its 450 thousand employees via email. In putting together the case studies for this article, we got more than 100 different Japanese NPOs to cooperate in our investigation, where we found that over 60% of NPOs have not managed to set up mid-to-long-term communication activity plans, which is probably true of most regular companies as well.

Let us take a look at some more recent campaigns by Dove, starting with the 2022 Reverse Selfie.

According to a study by Dove, many women lose their self-esteem because of certain types of information on digital media. As mentioned before, they compare themselves with the overly enhanced images of others and lose confidence, leading to a state of dejection. Consequently, 80% of young women use retouch apps (that edit photos to make eyes bigger, noses more shapely, bodies thinner, etc.) by the time they are thirteen years old. This then develops into a regular habit that becomes difficult to get out of. In other words, they get trapped in a situation where they are unable to reveal their true selves. Once that gets to be a constant routine, they get to a point where there is no going back. Dove saw the magnitude of this problem and started its Self-Esteem Project to encourage women caught in a downward spiral of losing confidence to be true to themselves. As the leading company in this endeavor, it aims to have helped a quarter billion young people around the world build their positive body image by 2030.

Younger generations these days tend to manage all of their communication in virtual spaces such as on smartphone and social media apps. Then they get caught up in the trend of the moment within their online community, dragged deeper and deeper in with no one else to consult. There is no particular problem if that virtual community is a space for positive communication, but it often presents “imposed standards of beauty” perpetuated by retouch app companies and the like. It is almost a form of intimidation. Society is also full of unreasonable assumptions about what constitutes “beauty.” Although no one knows who decided these standards, the presentation of such a concrete image of the “ultimate ideal” inevitably drives young girls to keep retouching their own images in pursuit of those unrealistic expectations. It’s important to note that these changes are not physical, and are purely digital manipulations that spread on virtual platforms like avatars. While the images are of themselves, they look very different from the original, expanding their reach with lives of their own. Then at some point they get out of control, as if the original has been taken over by their “ideal” image. However, those who suffer from this cannot escape unless they recognize the problem for themselves and understand the right steps to take, making it difficult for them to come across an effective prescription.

The Self-Esteem Project seeks to combat this issue by providing an opportunity for people to reflect on their own behaviors. In both study and business, the most effective way to understand what worked or didn’t work is to look back on one’s actions and learn from mistakes. The project takes young girls ages nine to thirteen caught in the vicious cycle of spiraling self-esteem and takes real video footage of the image retouching process they casually do on a regular basis, prompting them to think about whether the edited images truly represent who they are. The retouching process has a game-like quality that’s so amusing that one might lose track of time. But what do these girls feel when they actually see their before and after images side by side? The project has the girls question whether they can honestly say that the enhanced photos are who they actually are.

The Self-Esteem Project has run in twenty countries around the world, achieving 6 billion global impressions. It has helped teens reexamine whether excessive manipulation using filter apps to fit in with popular selfie culture is beneficial, successfully improving self-esteem and body confidence. Launching the campaign has also led to positive marketing results for Dove, with brand affinity increasing from 44% to 65%, women who felt more positive about their looks increasing from 50% to 58%, and Dove’s product sales rising by 11.9%.

This clearly proves the recent concept that brand engagement also contributes to sales. Consumers today are looking for entities that will empathize with an issue and help solve it rather than those that one-sidedly provide products. Dove’s project also goes one step further, providing parent and teacher versions of “Selfie Talk” kits to allow families and schools to identify and discuss these issues. This toolkit has been downloaded more than 40,000 times in the USA and has been calculated to have positively impacted roughly 180,000 consumers. Some schools have even adopted the kit as an educational tool.

In a sense, being honest also means exposing one’s true self. That might mean deliberately showing your unenhanced self, or unintentionally revealing that how you really look, even if you are exhausted, best represents what makes you beautiful. Now let us look at Dove’s effort to praise things the way they are, a campaign called Courage is Beautiful that was launched in March 2020 amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.

During this time, healthcare professionals worldwide worked day and night to save others from the mysterious virus, despite being at risk of contracting a disease not yet fully understood. In support, Dove donated much needed soap and hand sanitizer, where they witnessed those professionals pushing themselves to their limits working double and triple shifts. Here was the very image of the modern-day hero, and their courageous actions were the very embodiment of beauty. Truth be told, the healthcare professionals working under such extreme conditions looked worn out, grimy, and at times hollow and empty. But despite such appearances, there was beauty to be found in their determination and effort to save people regardless of the danger. The message being that beauty is not limited to physical form, and can also be conveyed through intent or actions. By showing society the healthcare professionals as they were and presenting them to the public eye, the campaign made viewers appreciate and relate to these workers, generating a positive spiral that in turn boosted the courage of the workers themselves. The campaign put the spotlight on a truth that, while not actively hidden, would never have been made public, but nevertheless deserved to be shared far and wide. Dove took it on itself to act as the medium by which to communicate this important truth as-is, with honesty and sincerity.

Dove’s sheer resolve to take on this role was impressive in itself, but the speed with which it implemented the campaign was just as remarkable. Four days after the initial idea proposal, the campaign started running in Canada and immediately spread to fifteen other countries worldwide. In just four days, they prepared footage and produced material to use in the campaign. They also purchased the necessary media outlets and organized relief efforts for actually delivering supplies to hospitals, supplying medical institutions around the world with necessities. Once the communication material featuring the faces of healthcare professionals around the globe went public, the video presenting their situation quickly garnered 2 billion views. Despite the obvious difficulties in carrying out ordinary production procedures amidst the pandemic, the campaign made use of new methods such as finding selfies on social media uploaded by the healthcare professionals themselves to use as material. They applied speed-oriented tactics such as using hashtags to search for images and contacting healthcare professionals with direct messages, and the production staff’s unhesitating attitude to try new methods demonstrates another kind of courage in itself.

The campaign was distributed globally through television, online video, print publication, outdoor signage, and PR activities. In the USA, Russia, Spain, and South Africa, the campaign cooperated with hospitals and collected data on medical worker shift patterns. On outdoor digital signage next to the busiest hospitals, the campaign showed the video in time with the beginning and end of worker shifts, managing to directly cheer on and encourage healthcare professionals working on the frontlines.

With this message, Dove garnered unprecedented engagement with 349% on Facebook, 1599% on X (formerly Twitter), and 99% likability on social media. Brand strength in major markets also got a boost, with an increase of 10 points in the USA and 5 points in the UK. The campaign also succeeded in making business contributions with brand awareness rising by 7% (USA) and 5% (UK) respectively. Analysis also shows that women in the main target audience developed a more positive attitude toward their unenhanced appearances.

Dove’s use of print media has also been superb in recent years. In the Reverse Selfie campaign, it highlights the damage from digital editing apps that set unrealistic standards of beauty. In the Courage is Beautiful campaign, it highlights the courage and actions of healthcare professionals. Given the brand’s underlying stance, perhaps it is only natural that Dove chooses print media for their campaigns. Going forward, choosing media that best reflects brand intent may become an important factor.

Toxic Influence aims to counter how harmful advice from online beauty influencers affect teenage girls and induce a crisis of self-esteem. Dove’s underlying intent and objective is always the same. Studies show that 92% of girls want to change the way they look, and one out of two of those girls follow these kind of influencers. Under the guise of giving advice, the influencer’s actual purpose is to sell products and services that will impart viewers with “fake beauty,” and typically begins by condemning the viewer’s current appearance. They include fear appeal in their advice, asking targets, “Are you really happy with the way you are? You could be more beautiful if you do this!”

The parents of these girls often don’t actually know that their daughters are exposed to such harmful information on a daily basis. The parents themselves make use of handy information from social media, and they assume that their daughters must also be getting beneficial information. With no parent intervention, the girls are unaware of the dangers they are exposed to, and naturally feel no need to talk to their parents about it. If this were happening in the real world, a parent would immediately step in to help if their daughter was caught by some sketchy dealer trying to exploit them on the street. However, this happens undetected online, incessantly over a long period of time, which is truly frightening to think about.

In order to bring this problem to light and provide a symbolic portrayal of the situation for wider understanding, Dove created a particular video. In it, the advice from harmful influencers that the girls hear every day are made to look like they come out of the person they trust more than anyone else in the world—their mothers—using deepfake technology. What do the mothers feel when they see themselves spouting the words that their daughters hear online? An innocuous comment would be fine, but what if those remarks were negative and made their daughters lose confidence? Some mothers who saw this immediately denied that it was them, exclaiming that they would never say such a thing or give such horrible advice. Others were too shocked to even move. The footage that captures these reactions is quite striking to see.

The backdrop that spawned this idea is the result of a user survey. The survey shows that there is a significant gap, perhaps even a disconnect, between the type of online content a parent consumes compared to their daughter. While the parent generation may be adept at discerning what information on social media they should or shouldn’t use, there is no doubt that their children still lack the experience they need to gauge whether information is reliable or not. In addition, 40% of mothers cannot name the influencers that their daughters follow, which means that they have no idea who their own children might be following online. The equivalent example in the real world would be if they had absolutely no knowledge of their children’s social lives, which would be highly worrying for a parent. In the face of such data, any parent would become concerned about letting their daughter be exposed to harmful information, but this kind of toxic relationship with social media is a daily occurrence that can be overlooked without some kind of cue.

The release of this video alerted parents to the fact that social media is constantly filled with harmful trends and manipulative words from influencers, and that their children vulnerably consume and get affected by such information. Of course, the parents are not the only ones at fault in this narrative, so Dove made sure to spare them from shame or criticism that they were not doing enough for their children by subsequently providing support to encourage conversations between parents and children, such as tools for explaining the dangers of social media and the importance of self-esteem.

A post-campaign survey shows that more than 70% of girls “felt better after unfollowing toxic beauty advice on social media,” and Dove simultaneously calls on parents to help their daughters detox their feeds. The campaign was initially launched in April 2022 in the USA, Canada, the UK, and Brazil, then later in fourteen other areas including Latin America, the EU, and South Africa, garnering 1.6 billion impressions in the USA alone and a 99% positive campaign sentiment.

While the Dove campaigns in this series under the theme of self-esteem may have individual differences in scale, duration, or target audiences, they all share the strong determination in pursuit of an ideal world. They almost feel like a reminder of that fundamental adage that the best secret to success is to persist until you succeed, but that is probably why they are so relatable and receive so much attention and support.