2024 Silver FMCG

Agency: Ogilvy UK

Client: Dove

Entry Title: Hard Knocks: A Superbowl Film

Executive Summary

For 20 years Dove has been the leader in women’s confidence. But, by 2024, the beauty confidence space was overpopulated, blunting the bran’s impact. It needed to breakthrough the “purpose washing clutter”.

Strategy

Dove had inspired so many brands to take up a ‘purpose position’ that it was at risk of getting drowned out. It needed to find unexpected ways to bring the brand positioning to life; to give people new reasons to care about the devastating impact of low self-esteem.

Research revealed 45% of girls drop out of sports due to low body confidence. But they didn’t stop loving sport. They simply stopped loving their bodies during puberty. Factors combine in a wave of self-consciousness, where sport becomes a terrifying amphitheatre of exposure.

Further research showed social support can improve adolescents’ self-evaluation and their self-esteem. Dove decided to reach as many people as possible, including parents and coaches, with success metrics focussed on earned impressions, PR amplification, social media engagement and visits to the website where educational material could be downloaded.

Creativity

The idea was to empower girls by providing everyone they encountered with one phrase they could keep at the forefront of their mind as a mission statement: #KeepHerConfident. It reminded everyone to be hyper-aware of how they talk about bodies around girls in a sports setting, how they’re coached, and how girls react to each other while playing sports.

To inspire meaningful action and spark change, Dove and Nike aimed to create the impact needed to tackle this problem at scale. The #KeepHerConfident campaign started on the biggest sporting stage in the world: Superbowl 2024, reaching a broad audience and rallying support to help girls find confidence in their changing bodies, and stay in sport for all the reasons they once loved.

Dove’s ‘Hard Knocks’ film was designed to take viewers somewhere unexpected for a Super Bowl. Set to the iconic Annie track “It’s a Hard Knock Life”, it pulled people in with an upbeat energy as viewers saw girls heroically recovering from the all-too-familiar knocks typical in sports.

Results

Since launch the #KeepHerConfident campaign has garnered 20 billion earned impressions, via 2,481 pieces of coverage, across eight different engagement tactics.

It ended up starting a movement, with more than 229 broadcast segments and a total positive sentiment of 98%. High-profile partners have included Venus Williams and Kylie Kelce, and also enjoyed shout-outs from a universe of sporting stars as well as broadcaster Jimmy Fallon and Senator Raumesh Akbari.

Owned organic views exceeded target by 625%. Hundreds of thousands of girls, parents and coaches praised the campaign, and shared assets with their followers across social media. Dove has more than reinforced its leadership position as a purposeful brand - outperforming the campaign's impressions KPI target by 448%. The brand is on track to coach 1 million girls in 2024, and annually going forward.