A division of the corporate giant Unilever, Dove is an international manufacturer of personal care products such as soaps, deodorants, and moisturizers. In 2004 the brand launched its now-famous “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a series of advertisements created by the Ogilvy & Mather agency. The ads typically showed a group of women of various shapes, colors, and ages clad only in undergarments (and sometimes wearing nothing at all). Plastered all over billboards, buses, and magazines until the campaign shifted focus to girls’ self-esteem in 2010, the images were meant to challenge standards of beauty that idealize youth and thinness, to encourage self-esteem in women, and, of course, to sell Dove’s products.
This video was created by filmmaker Tim Piper in 2006 and uploaded to YouTube as part of Dove’s extended marketing plan. In a minute and fourteen seconds of stop-action photography, “Evolution” shows the process by which a regular woman’s face is transformed into an advertising image—and highlights the startling extent to which such images are manipulated. As Ogilvy & Mather intended, the video quickly went viral, garnering more than 20 million views (and counting).
Watch “Evolution,” and respond to the following questions.