The idea was to play off of a real and current topic in a lighthearted way. Using a playful but smart tone, we outlined some “alternative facts” of our own about Dove antiperspirant. The juxtaposition between the ten alternative facts and our actual fact had to be just right so that the reader was in on the joke. And it certainly didn’t hurt that we got the name of a new product in an ad TEN times.

In order to stay relevant, we had very little time to execute the ad. The creative was concepted, written, and designed a few days after Alternative Facts became pop culture jargon. We received client approval in a matter of hours, and less than 48 hours later our ad was up and running the The Guardian and The Times.

After the #AlternativeFacts campaign, there was a massive surge in conversation around Dove and antiperspirant, which earned 152 million social impressions (over 50% more than the brand averaged in the previous year). The #AlternativeFacts campaign was the largest social media conversation driver for Dove when observing data from January 2016 to March 14th 2017. We received worldwide media coverage, including Huffington Post, Elle, Vogue, Refinery29, Yahoo, PopSugar, AOL, and Hollywood Reporter, reaching almost 100 million unique monthly visitors. Celebrities such as Michael Moore and George Takei also shared the ad. Did we mention it was also the week before the Super Bowl? As Super Bowl ads were being teased and leaked online, we managed to steer the conversation not towards football, but to antiperspirant.