Dove Ad Makeover

‘Lose weight now’… ‘Get a bikini body in 6 weeks’… ‘Want bigger boobs?’ These are just a few of the negative messages we’re forced to see online every day, via different advertisements. But what if the power of advertising was in your hands? Whether we are watching TV or shopping for a new pair of jeans, there’s no escape from the people trying to make a buck at the expense of our body image.

With such bombardment from the media preying on our insecurities, it’s not hard to see why so many of us are suffering from low self-esteem, and why the percentage of women who would describe themselves as beautiful is just 4% globally.

It made us wonder what would the result be if women could take control of advertising, and swap these negative messages with encouraging messages? How much would our beauty confidence improve if we were surrounded by messages of support instead of criticism?

We decided to find out. We launched the Dove Ad Makeover: a groundbreaking Facebook app that hands the power of advertising over to women. Buying up ad space that might’ve previously been filled with the guilt-inducing adverts, we gave our fans the chance to replace them with compliments.

The process was simple: we purchased a great ad space and then handed the responsibility of filling it over to our fans. All they had to do was select a message from one of eight choices, including 'Your birthday suit suits you,' 'Everybody is beautiful' and 'The perfect bum is the one you’re sitting on', choose who they wanted the new ad to appear to – thanks to Dove, a body positive message appears in the place of whatever criticising message was there before.

And the result? A huge 71% of women we spoke to after the Dove Ad Makeover said that they felt more beautiful as a result of the campaign: an incredible step towards enabling women everywhere to realise their full beauty potential.