2023 Bronze Thoughtful Marketing

Agency: Ogilvy UK & DAVID

Client: DOVE

Entry Name: #TurnYourBack

Executive Summary

Dove launched a global movement in just 72 hours to take a stand against a TikTok beauty filter that was destroying women’s confidence.

Strategy

For decades Dove has been the champion of real beauty, fighting against a world that tells women they need to change how they look to meet society’s standards.

The new Bold Glamour filter on TikTok took this to a new extreme. It used AI technology to manipulate a user’s features to provide a digital ‘fix’ to their face. Within hours, the filter had been used hundreds of millions of times - officially becoming a crisis of concern.

Dove needed to act with unprecedented agility and with the same viral influencer force the Bold Glamour filter had behind it.

The agencies’ approach was to rapidly create a global task force of diverse influencers and leverage their power with a message just as sharable, but much more empowering.

Creativity

A simple, provocative, and empowering action: getting influencers to go against best practice content creation on TikTok, encouraging them to not speak or look into the lens - but to simply turn their back to it.

This immediately stood out against face-to-camera content - and it was a simple action their followers could share or replicate.

Crucially it landed a PR message - via chat shows, national broadcast media and even coverage of the Oscars - that influencers were turning their back on damaging filters.

Results

Within 72 hours, 73 influencers were activated in eight markets achieving (to date) 54 million video views and more than 390k total engagements on TikTok.

The campaign exceeded TikTok benchmarks with the UK achieving 7.5% and 10% average in North America.

#TurnYourBack generated 1.1 billion reach from 174 pieces of earned media coverage, and took over 25 Out Of Home mega screens across London rail station concourses, achieving 3.24 million impacts.

And the work reinforced Dove as the advocate of real beauty in the AI age. Gleam, one of the biggest influencer talent agencies in the world, changed its influencer editing policies and joined Dove in the fight against the filter.

Contributors

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