To show how far the Dove Self-Esteem Project had come in 10 years, we started where it all began: we found young women who had participated in the Dove Self-Esteem Program as girls, and showed how their new-found confidence was helping them achieve so much today.

We showcased their transformation in a film that seamlessly integrated their strong, confident present-day selves into still photos of their younger, insecure selves.

We then used a powerful and inspiring original song to demonstrate how far so many insecure little girls have come, as a result of the efforts of the Dove Self-Esteem Project. When the confident and talented singer of this song is revealed to be a young woman named Alexis, a former graduate of the Dove Self-Esteem Project, she provides living proof that our Self-Esteem Project is working.

To show how far we’d come in 10 years, we found 3 accomplished young women who had participated in the Dove Self-Esteem Project years ago as girls. We showed how strong self-esteem was helping them achieve so much today:

•Alexa, who hated her glasses and was called a nerd, had become a confident and determined journalist.

•Raquel, an elite dancer, once believed she was too curvy to succeed in dance.

•Alexis, who was told she was too ugly to look at, had found her personal beauty as a professional jazz singer.

We had targeted strategies to reach both mom and young adults.

In social, we developed animated GIFs, one per girl, which ran on Facebook and Instagram. Here we tailored the messaging based on our target.

We drove Moms 35-49 to our website to download the DSEP resources and share them with her children. We drove young adults 25-34 to our YouTube Channel to learn more about these girls’ stories and to educate them on the benefits of fostering strong self-esteem for a young girl in their lives. The girls were also featured on our in-store POS material.

In the end, we provided living proof that the Dove Self-Esteem Project is not just an ad campaign. It’s actually changing lives.

The “Look How Far We’ve Come” social mission touched the lives of over 13,000 girls and young women in the first month alone. By year end, we had exceeded our lives touched goal by 70%. We achieved over 4 million video views, which was 10 times higher than projected. And we out-performed Google’s Consumer Packaged Goods benchmark for view through rate by 10%. Alexis’ powerful performance of the song “Look How Far I’ve Come” was also a top performing release on Sound Cloud, where it received almost 23,000 plays. Finally, dollar share for Dove grew by 30 bps, a significant increase compared to our monthly trend of +13 bps.