Girls today deal with more body-image pressures than any generation before.

Low self-esteem has now become a global epidemic.

As the world’s biggest educator of self-esteem, Dove has helped over 29 millions of kids around the world build self-esteem over the past 14 years, in the classroom and via online content. But we needed a way to help more kids. Far more.

Our objective was to reach 20 million more lives, totalling 60 million by 2020.

How could we turbo-charge the Dove Self-Esteem project to educate millions more kids in an even shorter space of time?

What if we could create self-esteem educational material that kids actually seek out?

Girls today deal with more body-image pressures than any generation before.

To make matters worse, they keep this tension bottled up, disguising their anxieties with two common words;

“I’m fine”

Using the power of animation, we uncovered the truth behind these seemingly innocent words, and for the first time brought to life the feelings and pressures hidden inside the minds of real girls.

Girls from around the world creatively expressed their innermost feelings, each writing and performing lyrics to their own personal songs.

In collaboration with each girl, we transformed their songs into bespoke animations, taking us on a vivid journey through each girl’s mind. Every element of each film was hand-crafted to represent their unique perspectives, in a way only animation could express.

The films opened parents’ eyes to these hidden issues, with the Dove Self-Esteem Project enabling them to help their daughters deal with issues of self-esteem.

The campaign worked in 2 distinct parts to help kids build self-esteem in different ways.

Part one saw Dove partner with Cartoon Network and create content targeted directly to kids aged 6-14, in a language they know and love, with every piece of content helping them build self-esteem. Within this part of the campaign, we created multiple integrated executions including Dove-exclusive episodes of Steven Universe, an interactive e-book and a music video.

Part 2, entitled “I’m Fine”, saw films specifically targeted to parents, helping them understand that what their kids say is not always how they feel. By opening parents’ eyes to some of the pressures and self-esteem issues girls go through every day, parents were eager to download Dove self-esteem education material to help their kids. Parents were also precision targeted on social and other digital channels to further promote the partnership and increase downloads of self-esteem material.

Dove is the world’s biggest educator of self-esteem.

By talking in-depth to hundreds of girls around the world, we were able build a deep understanding of how personal and individual every self-esteem story is.

For our campaign to resonate with girls everywhere, it needed to be equally as unique and personalised at every level.

To bring these unique stories to life, the girls creatively expressed their thoughts by writing and performing lyrics to their own personal songs.

As a co-creation with each girl, these lyrics were then used to inspire a visual journey through her mind, from her own unique perspective. Animation was the perfect fit to execute this, as we were going beyond the real world and representing something that only existed in their minds. Our team of animators transformed each girl into a bespoke cartoon version of herself, working alongside the kids to authentically represent their inner struggles with self-esteem in a way that personally resonated with them, down to the smallest of details.

We didn’t want to limit the personal stories to those within our films, so we partnered with Cartoon Network to build a customizable e-book, allowing kids everywhere to be at the centre of their very own animated self-esteem story. Alongside characters from their favourite cartoon series, Steven Universe, kids enjoyed learning how to build a healthy self-esteem in a way that was unique to them, by utilising their personal details such as name, physical appearance, personal interest and gender identity.

The campaign ran in cinema, TV and online, with amplifications to social, PR, events, print and mobile. The campaign had media support in twelve countries, including USA, UK, France, South Africa, Philippines, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Chile and Canada, starting in July 2018.

• The campaign generated over 1.3 billion impressions globally

• The partnership helped over 12.8 million kids build self-esteem in the first 6 months alone, over double our initial target of 5 million lives reached

• Compared to our traditional program tactics, the Cartoon Network episodes gave us dramatic increases in Lives Reached in key markets: +192% USA, +551% Mexico, +599% Brazil, +8075% Argentina.

• Online content had a 99% positive sentiment, with huge support from Steven Universe fans

• Dove-exclusive Steven Universe episodes received over 9X more views versus the average Steven Universe episode

• Average monthly downloads of Dove self-esteem materials went from 150 to 12,230 in key markets, totaling over 48,000 additional downloads during the campaign

• 266 million views of “I’m Fine” amplification films to adults