Updated on February 12, 2020.
Featured image sourced from WithAll.
Successful video marketers understand human emotions and play on these to great effect.
Whether awe, humor or compassion are the instrumental emotion, a good video marketer can tap into the sense of enchantment video can provide, and they can quickly engage viewers.
Dove’s “Real Beauty” Campaign
Dove provided a superb example of this by tapping into a modern phenomenon and a contentious societal issue: the objectification of women and the worrying effects it can have on women’s confidence and mental health. They did so with their Evolution video.
Dove’s been in the marketing game for a long time, producing both photographic and cinematic advertisements depicting what they consider to be real women, i.e. the kind of women who tend to purchase their products.
This is a stark contrast to the majority of other cosmetics companies, who have a tendency to employ beautiful models often airbrushed beyond any sense of realism. Presumably the driving force behind this idea is that women will assume that the product will in some way bring their appearance more in line with what the media pushes as “ideal.”
This is what makes Dove’s latest installment of Real Beauty advertisements so wonderfully innovative.
The Premise
The video documents a number of women describing their features to an artist situated behind a curtain. The artist asks the women to describe their features and draws a representation of this description.
Next, people who had met the women in the waiting area were brought in and asked to describe what they noticed about the appearance of each woman. The disparity between self-description and what others perceived was startling.
Effective Branded Content
It is interesting to note that no direct references to Dove products were made, in fact the only indication that this was a Dove marketing video came at the end with the appearance of a logo.
This is a great example of social commentary in advertising, and demonstrates the need to know your market and target your strategy carefully.
Dove took great care to understand their average customer and was able to produce a meaningful, emotionally satisfying, and subtle video, which represents their philosophy and brand while respecting their customer base.