Personal care brand Dove has released a new spot, created by Ogilvy and directed by Benito Montorio, on the heavily altered process of creating a selfie in reverse, in a bid to celebrate real beauty.
The Unilever-owned brand launched a series of assets online under its #NoDigitalDistortion campaign, with a 60-second film the centrepiece, aiming to highlights the damage to girls caused by heavily-edited selfies on social media.
The film, released in Canada and called Reverse Selfie, is a sequel to Dove’s 2006 campaign ad, Evolution, which spotlighted the advertising and media industries’ impossible ideals of beauty.
Created by Ogilvy, Dove’s latest campaign shows how the pressure to post the ‘perfect selfie’ is hurting the self-esteem and confidence of young people. More screen time during the pandemic, Dove says, has only made this worse.
It draws from an insight that 80 per cent of Canadian girls had downloaded a filter or used an app to change their appearance in selfies by the time they were 13-years-old.
Reverse Selfie begins by showing what appears to be a young woman posting a heavily-edited image of herself on social media, before then playing in reverse.
We see the process of editing and augmenting move backwards, with the tweaks to the image revealed, to finally show that the woman is in fact a young girl, implied to be barely in her teens.
“By age 13, 80 per cent of girls distort the way they look online,” Dove writes in a message on the campaign.
“#NoDigitalDistortion is our long-standing movement to help young people build confidence and positive body image on social media.
“The Dove Self-Esteem Project has been on a mission to build positive body image since 2004. Now, we’ve created a new Confidence Kit to guide young people to be their most confident selves.”
Dove is also urging parents and teachers to “Have the selfie talk with a girl you love to reverse the damage and celebrate real beauty. The Dove Self-Esteem Project can show you how.”
For more information on the campaign, click here.
Featured image source: YouTube/Dove US
