Released last Sunday, Dove's "Real Beauty Sketches" rocketed to the top of the Viral Video Chart for last week, topping some big competition from Kmart's "Ship My Pants" and Evian's babies. The video, released 10 days ago, has already amassed 29.4 million views, over 35 related clips, 7,800 comments and over 660,000 Facebook shares, according to Visible Measures.
In the campaign, a forensic artist creates composite sketches of women based on their own descriptions of their facial features. Later, strangers also give descriptions of the same women – the results are illuminating, and the spot ends with the tagline "You are more beautiful than you think."
For Unilever, its a return to the Campaign for Real Beauty which first launched in 2004, but had been de-emphasized in recent years. The first campaign was big-budget and controversial. This time it's just one video that happened to catch fire.Naturally, the campaign has a parody video in which guys test their own self-image.
