To help combat age stigma and to inspire women everywhere to come out of the “age closet”, we created a 50-day, 50-woman celebration of beauty at every age. We did this by recruiting 50 real women who were brave enough to declare their ages publicly, on their birthdays. Across almost 500 unique creative executions, we celebrated their age, loudly and proudly, one woman a day for 50 consecutive days. All this to help women feel a little less fearful about aging, and a lot more beautiful. Our larger mission was to restore “Dove Love” amongst our core target of women of 35+, after 2 consecutive years of steadily declining sales.

Through Facebook, we conducted a nationwide search for 50 women who were about to celebrate their birthdays and were brave enough to reveal their ages in a very public way. These real women were flown in from all over to form our age-proud cast. We then launched in national newspaper, with a front and back cover take-over that featured one of our women hiding her age with her hand. Through the newspaper’s own augmented reality function, readers used their phones to bring our woman to life as she revealed her age and her beautifully inspiring attitude toward aging. Every day thereafter, for 50 consecutive days, we celebrated a different woman’s age on her birthday, using standard and digital outdoor boards, augmented reality newspaper, social media, youtube and online videos, digital ads, in-store and PR. In total, our women and their ages were splashed across almost 500 unique creative executions.

Our Beautiful Age campaign deeply resonated with women, inspiring so many to come out of the closet and proudly declare their ages. Through Facebook, Twitter and other social media, thousands applauded our women for their bravery and their beauty. We even received the unsolicited support of celebrities like singer “Mitsou”, who shared our communication with her fan base, simply because she believed in the message. Using 9 different media, our campaign generated almost 240 million impressions in only 50 days. And, after two years of steadily declining sales on Dove, our refocus on the brand’s beauty mission struck a real chord with our 35+ consumers. Our effort succeeded in reversing the downward trend, generating strong sales growth with the highest growth peaks occurring while our campaign was in market. It seems making women feel better about aging also made them feel better about buying Dove.