Not many campaigns make it 20 years, as Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty has, marking an anniversary this week with marketers ringing the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange. But when the first ads hit the U.S. market in September 2004, it wasn’t certain the campaign would even last 20 days.

The original “Tick Box” campaign from Ogilvy and photographer Ian Rankin, which included print ads in Condé Nast magazines and billboards featuring “real women,” provoked controversy. One showed a woman thicker than a typical beauty model with the tick box choices of “fat” or “fit.” Another showed a 96-year-old Black woman with the choices “wrinkled” or “wonderful.” Out-of-home ads, including in Times Square, showed a diverse lineup of women in their underwear.

It was all “incredibly controversial,” said Stacie Bright, at the time a marketing communications manager with Unilever, now a consultant. “I do remember senior leadership considering pulling the effort,” Bright said. “I put my career on the line and told them to give it time. It took a lot of bravery and late nights.”

Maureen Shirreff, group creative director for Ogilvy on Dove at the time, recalled a journalist saying during an event: “If I want to see thighs that thick, I’ll just go to Taste of Chicago.”

But the idea stuck, changing the narrative in beauty, and possibly among journalists. It was championed by Silvia Lagnado, who had taken a global role as senior VP overseeing Dove in 2001. She wanted a new campaign for the brand, and had put considerable strategy work behind it.

Ultimately the campaign worked, because, as Lagnado said in an email, “it was highly relevant for the brand and for women, and very emotional.”

The campaign and marketers behind it have had an impact well beyond Unilever. Lagnado subsequently took top marketing roles at Bacardi, McDonald’s and Natura. Fernando Machado, another Dove marketer during the campaign, went on to Burger King, Activision and plant-based food brand NotCo as a chief marketer.

Shirreff noted that many, possibly most, major beauty brands have since taken to showing a diverse range of “real women” in ads over the past two decades. Even arch-competitors such as Procter & Gamble Co. couldn’t help but take notice and be influenced.

Dove celebrated that legacy at an event in downtown Manhattan on Tuesday evening, where partygoers mostly consisted of influencers and editors. The event featured bracelet making with direct-to-consumer jewelry brand Susan Alexandra, a panel discussion with actresses Beanie Feldstein, Drew Barrymore and Marsai Martin, and a showing of Dove’s new campaign “The Code,” which promotes the brand’s new pledge to never use AI in its advertising to portray real people.  Sao Paulo-based Soko handled creative, while Media.Monks developed so-called prompt guidelines that people can use to make images representative of Real Beauty when using generative AI.

On the panel, Barrymore referred to Dove’s Real Beauty campaign as “the spark that ignited a movement.”

“Look at the world we live in now—it is different. … We still have the same demons, and they’re coming in the form of AI and not in airbrushing,” she said. 

How it started

Shirreff was part of the original team that put together in about six months in 2002, under Lagnado’s direction, a book of words and pictures to describe what Dove is. Current Dove CMO Alessandro Manfredi, who was part of the team then too, in a LinkedIn post described the process as “a series of sleepless nights” at Ogilvy’s Chicago office drafting the “Dove Beauty Theory” book. Then came a year of brand stewardship workshops globally for people at Unilever and Ogilvy in 2003, “where we first started to realize the power of what ‘Real Beauty’ could mean,” he said.

That it all has worked out 20 years later, he said, is shown by Dove having its best underlying sales growth year of the past decade in 2023 (reaching $6.5 billion in global sales, more than double its $3 billion in 2004).

The campaign was an outgrowth of Dove’s heritage going back to when David Ogilvy was writing the copy for its ads in the 1960s, as Shirreff sees it. Dove always tended to use “real women” rather than models in ads, she said. It also was a reaction to TV shows of the time, such as “The Swan” reality series on Fox, that promoted “extreme makeovers” for women.

The brief for the original work was to create a mission for Dove that stood above all the product ads, and which would also “widen the definition of beauty,” Shirreff said. “That means we had to start to include women you had never seen in beauty ads before.”

The impact of that approach became obvious in casting calls worldwide, Shirreff said. “Over the years, I bet I’ve met a couple thousand real women in casting calls,” she said. “What so moved me every time, without exception, women would come up to me with tears in their eyes and say, ‘Nobody ever told me I was beautiful before.’”

How the campaign got bigger

Within two years, the campaign grew far bigger than that original outdoor and print effort, including a Super Bowl ad in 2006, followed that year by what would be a far bigger hit, the Cannes Lions Grand Prix-winning “Evolution” video.

Over the years, ads that were part of the Campaign for Real Beauty have received far less media spending than the bulk of the advertising for the brand, which is product-focused. Dove doesn’t have a Campaign for Real Beauty budget per se or a requirement to do the ads on a schedule, but does break its planning down into “purpose” and “product” campaigns, according to a person familiar with the matter. Regardless, the Campaign for Real Beauty is what people seem to recall first about Dove.

Machado, who was global brand development VP on Dove from 2010 to 2014, saw that firsthand when traveling. When he would tell border control officers at JFK what he did, “the conversation completely changed,” he said. “It would be like, ‘Oh, such a great brand, real women, real beauty.’”

Machado, who worked on Dove across many CRB efforts, including “Real Beauty Sketches,” said what he learned in working on the campaign influenced how he thought about marketing at his subsequent stops as a marketer.

“It was an amazing four years in my career and my life,” Machado said. Among other things, he said it taught him about “the strength of a powerful insight that’s a real human truth. I’m always searching for that.”

Disruption beyond Dove

For Jim Stengel, who has focused on purpose marketing since his days at P&G and during his nearly 16 subsequent years as a consultant, Campaign for Real Beauty ranks “at least among the top five” of purpose-driven campaigns. “I don’t know what would rank above it right now,” he said.

“They never got tired of it,” Stengel said. “They’re still innovating through their purpose. They’re serious. They’re meaningful. They link it to their business. And they do it in a way that’s very natural.”

This may not always have been the easiest thing for Stengel to say, since he was rival P&G’s chief marketer in 2004 when Unilever launched the campaign. But he admired it from afar, even if not everyone at P&G did.

“It was the reaction that any disruption brings,” Stengel said of how P&G viewed Dove’s campaign. “There were people who dismissed it, because it seemed so far afield that it wasn’t going to be relatable or sustainable. It broke so many of the norms. But some felt they were owning a space that’s maybe the biggest space in the category, and that is very threatening to several of P&G’s businesses, especially Olay. So I think it had a reaction of surprise, some rejection and eventually lots of admiration.”

Campaign for Real Beauty also inspired purpose work at P&G, such as the Always “Like a Girl” campaign. Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer at P&G, has said the process that led to “Like a Girl” began at the Cannes Lions festival in 2013, when P&G execs watched—with a certain level of envy—as “Sketches” won 19 Lions, including the coveted Titanium Grand Prix.

Campaign as a talent magnet

Daniel Fisher was working for Leo Burnett in 2006 when he saw “Evolution” for the first time. “It was startling the way it makes you feel that truth,” Fisher said. “I remember walking out of my office at Leo Burnett and thinking I need to up my game.’”

By 2019, he was working for Ogilvy on Unilever, currently as global executive creative director. And he said Dove and the Campaign for Real Beauty help attract talent to the agency to this day. He recently spoke to a new hire who mentioned “one of the reasons they joined is because they have a teenage daughter and they love all the work that we’ve been doing,” Fisher said. “It’s impossible to have a daughter age 16 and not empathize with the stories we’ve been telling in the last four or five years. Absolutely, people are drawn to that.”

Among recent CRB work from Ogilvy is the 2024 Super Bowl spot, a “Cost of Beauty” ad calling for a bill to help prevent harm to girls from toxic social media posts, and a salute to health care workers in the early days of the pandemic.

Fisher also worked on the recently launched “10 vs. 10” campaign in the U.K. drawing attention to the steep increase in 10-year-old girls using anti-aging products by showing carefree girls alongside others using anti-aging serums and eye masks, asking “Why did 10 stop looking like this?”

The pandemic salute to health care workers, one of the more memorable in a flood of brand ads in the early pandemic days four years ago, was one of the first Dove projects Fisher was involved with. And it was an example, he said, of a place where the brand earned a right to speak largely because of its Real Beauty legacy.

Ogilvy has done most, but not all, of the ad campaign creative, with exceptions that include work by Interpublic’s Lola in 2021 and more recently by Soko, Sao Paulo, which handled “The Code.”

Edelman’s role

Often overlooked is that, from its beginning, Campaign for Real Beauty also was a PR effort, originally linked to the Dove Fund for Self-Esteem and a “Uniquely Me!” self-esteem campaign for U.S. Girl Scout Troops.

Underpinning that was a global survey conducted by Edelman, about women and beauty, which had a bigger impact once the findings were “flipped on their head” to point out that only 2% of women said they felt beautiful, Bright said.

Lisa Sepulveda, who worked on the campaign from the start and is now global chief client officer of Edelman, had two daughters ages 7 and 8 at the time.

“I knew right away how important the impact of this would be,” Sepulveda said, “not just for my daughters … but for women all over the world who did not see themselves as beautiful. Most women’s self-esteem had been challenged by the images the beauty industry had promoted for their entire lives.”

The Dove Self-Esteem project has since reached more than 100 million girls globally, Sepulveda said. Another outgrowth of the campaign has been Dove’s support of the Crown Act against race-based hair discrimination, which since has been enacted in 24 states.

And, she said, the effort has had a positive impact on agencies, beyond changing the narrative about beauty.

“All of the agency partners working with the Dove brand,” Sepulveda said, “were asked by our clients to work together to get to the idea that would ultimately become a campaign that drives real impact and create an authentic movement with staying power.”

The campaign has also drawn criticism over the years.

Below, a look at some of the high and low Real Beauty moments.

Tested on Real Curves (2004)

Billboards by Ogilvy London for Dove Firming moisturizer in the U.K. made an instant impression, pitching the product as “tested on real curves.” Shot by noted British photographer Rankin, the ads aimed to be aspirational without using models or airbrushing techniques—a revolutionary combination for the beauty industry.

Evolution (2006)

The “Evolution” video was the campaign’s first big breakthrough, exposing the false perception of beauty in a time-lapse video. Created by Ogilvy & Mather Toronto and directed by Tim Piper and Yael Staav, it was the first double Grand Prix winner in the history of the Cannes Lions—topping the Film and Cyber competitions.

Onslaught (2007)

“Onslaught,” also made by Ogilvy Toronto, showed a little girl bombarded by media images seemingly designed to make her insecure about her looks. The ad earned fewer awards and more criticism, including a social media meme accusing Unilever of hypocrisy for also making Axe ads showing sex-crazed model-esque women.

Pro Age (2008)

Dove caught more flack in 2008 with Ogilvy ads featuring barely covered older female models to support its launch of Pro-Age products. Controversy flared when a professional photo retoucher told a New Yorker reporter he’d done work on photos shot by Annie Leibovitz for the print portion of the campaign.

Real Beauty Sketches (2013)

After reverting to more conventional product-performance claims from 2009 to 2012, the brand unleashed one of its most famous campaigns, “Real Beauty Sketches,” from Ogilvy Brazil, in 2013. It showed a forensic artist drawing portraits of women—one based off descriptions from the women themselves, the other from strangers they’d just met. The differences revealed a self-esteem gap Dove believed wasn’t just common but almost universal. The campaign won the Titanium Grand Prix at Cannes.

Selfie (2014)

At the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, Dove marked the campaign’s 10th anniversary with “Selfie,” an eight-minute film by Oscar-winning documentarian Cynthia Wade. In it, a photographer teaches high school girls and their moms to boost their confidence and expand their views of what beauty is by taking self portraits with their smartphones and posting them on social media.

Courage Is Beautiful (2020)

In a twist on the “Real Beauty” idea, Ogilvy Canada rolled out “Courage Is Beautiful,” a campaign showing the faces of healthcare workers marked by the protective gear they’d been wearing during the coronavirus crisis. The work broke in early April 2020, just weeks into the COVID-19 pandemic. The photos were taken by Italian photographer Alberto Giuliani.

The Cost of Beauty (2023)

On the 10th anniversary of “Sketches,” Dove and Ogilvy unveiled another powerful short film about self-esteem—in particular among teens girls, who are suffering mental health issues from social media content. “The Cost of Beauty” told the story of Mary, a kid who spirals after getting access to social media, eventually developing an eating disorder. The spot sought legislative change by supporting the Kids Online Safety Act, pointing viewers to a petition to support the Act, which aimed to limit teens’ exposure to toxic beauty content online.

Contributing: Phoebe Bain