The Dove Self-Esteem Project has been working with the Centre of Appearance Research at the University of West England on research into body image. Through this initiative, Dove is on a mission to educate a quarter of a billion young people in self-esteem and body confidence by 2030.

Based on this research, Girls Room was created to meet a young female audience where they already spend their time, with entertainment that’s endemic to the style of content they’re already consuming. The goal of the series was to create storytelling that the core audience would watch entirely, and that also would reach the target audience of girls aged 13-18. Engagement was prioritized, along with positive sentiment to drive organic virality and start a lasting cultural conversation.

Girls Room is based on those moments spent in bathrooms – an everyday space where girls experiment with their appearance and shape their sense of self. It’s also a place of vulnerability, where they come face to face with the mirror, the scales and their insecurities.

According to The Dove Self-Esteem Project’s academic research into body image, there are several factors that influence girls’ body confidence. To contextualize this research for audiences, they highlighted five of those factors. Through five episodes and five characters that directly tied back to each theme, it followed each character – Minnie, Melba, Thelma, Gloria and Carlotta – from the school bathroom back to their own bathrooms at home. In her own way, each character confronts one of the barriers to self-esteem that teen girls face every day, including social media, teasing and bullying, body image issues, and challenges with respecting and looking after yourself.

Girls Room is the first ever scripted series created in a cinematically vertical format optimized for IGTV, with the intention of reaching young girls where they spend a significant portion of their time – on social media. By building completely custom sets, using physical tools specific for vertical filming, and highly stylized lighting, costumes and production design, a world that could be fully manipulated was constructed, allowing for dynamic framing and a show that is truly vertically cinematic.

Academically-based research about self-esteem and body confidence was woven into every aspect of the series, from broad episode themes to minor dialogue choices. Not only were the platform and style of the videos optimized for the target audience, the media specifically targeted females 13-18.

Within its 5 mid-form episodes, Girls Room had us fall in love with its characters, who faced the challenges of growing up in today's social media-fueled world. Academic research was seamlessly integrated into the show to make sure it had a positive, lasting impact on viewers’ self-esteem.

Girls Room premiered on February 26, 2020 and ran weekly until the final episode was released on March 25, 2020. To embrace Girls Room as a true series, Dove produced a series trailer and teasers for each episode to promote tune-in, engagement, and retention. The campaign was strategically planned to reach ages 13-18 (with a female focus) on the social media platforms where they’re already active. All content was promoted on ATTN:’s owned Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (In-Feed, IGTV, and Stories), and YouTube channels. The series was filmed in vertical dimensions, 9x16, to be as immersive as possible on mobile-first platforms.

Girls Room garnered 5.1M total views and 72K total engagements across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Retention was exceptional, with an average of 6.4% on IGTV and 8.9% for those who watched at least 50% on Facebook. The series successfully reached the target audience of A13-18, and of the 3.2M teens reached by the series, 97% were female. Engagement and sentiment for the campaign was overwhelmingly positive. The top reaction across all episodes was “love,” and the series elicited strong and vulnerable emotions, with 35% of all comments deemed “emotional.”

The series achieved organic virality, bringing in 1.9M total organic views across the entire campaign. The conversation surrounding the series extended into an original premiere event, convening influencers and press for an unforgettable evening that immersed 70+ guests from 23+ press outlets in the world of the show with its creators, cast, and Lena Waithe.