How can we use technology to help make women feel more beautiful?

Dove Utility Brief

That was the challenge.

The issue? That every woman’s notion of what it is to feel beautiful is highly personal, and driven by a complex combination of personal, social and cultural factors that are nuanced globally.

What they share is exposure to unrealistic and omnipresent visions of female beauty. Little wonder it's damaging psychological wellbeing.

Our light-bulb moment was realising the internet was designed by scientists for scientists and that its taxonomy reflects this bias: it’s organised around the types of content people would like to access, not how that content will make them feel.

Our vision was to use technology to increase women’s mindfulness of unrealistic visions of beauty: empowering them to take control of their own self-image.

In its first iteration Emzara is a UK focused Chrome plug-in that scans internet content, nudging women to be mindful of things that may expose them to beauty pressure, and the impact that may have on their self-esteem.

Ultimately our ambition is to globally re-set the relationship women have with the Internet.

Positive consumer actions across multiple channels – likes, clicks and video interactions – were tracked and contributed to a single global count hosted on Tumblr. This was a new form of consumer engagement for Dove; a flexible, updating web presence that encouraged subsequent interactions.

Women could learn more about the campaign, viewing additional content and a crafted list of consumer contributions to the overall story. Behind the scenes, we monitored consumer engagement, feeding into campaign decisions for the next day, such as what content to promote and where, and what extra content eg. self esteem resources, to produce and release.

In the first two weeks the short film was viewed more than 100 million times across 70 countries. It reached over 4 billion impressions, 600,000 shares and more than 125,000 social mentions. The Tumblr page was visited more than 3 million times with an average time on site of three minutes.

More than 600,000 women around the world made their choice. And the results are astonishingly positive: 75% chose beautiful. The campaign successfully continued the conversation on beauty by encouraging women to reconsider the choices they make about their appearance and how those choices make them feel.