Dove launched a new video today, Onslaught, as a follow-up to their popular Evolution video that I recently included in post I wrote last week entitled Viral Marketing at its Best. I've been writing quite a bit about viral video campaigns ever since I attended the Promo Live show in Chicago a couple of weeks ago where there was quite a bit of discussion over this hot and growing medium.
Onslaught was launched both on YouTube and on Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty website which promotes their Self-Esteem Fund. Evolution was a Cannes 2007 Grand Prix winner and with this new video they are hoping it will be just as big of a hit. It's a 60 second spot that opens on the face on a young innocent 7-year old girl looking at the camera with a music sound track that starts and repeats the words "Here it comes". What follows is supposed to represent the thousands of images that she will see over the course of the year from various skin care, fashion and beauty related companies. It ends with the tagline, "Talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does."
Dove's CFRB site encourages viewers to voice their opinions on their discussion board about the "onslaught of beauty pressures". They specifically ask the question, "After watching the film, do you think the media affects us more than we realize?". The film does bring attention to the fact that we are bombarded with these images everyday no matter where we look. I was very reminded of this when I got to hear Maureen Shirreff talk about it at PMA's Annual Conference. Maureen is Creative Director at Ogilvy and Mather directing the team that has been the creative inspiration behind the Dove campaign and of this new video. She reviewed with us the campaign's background and showed us a few of the ads we see from the other so called beauty industry companies. You can read more about her and Dove in this post. I have two teenage daughters and I am concerned about how it affects them because the are exposed to this fake "beauty" so much more than my generation was at that age.
So you can join the discussion groups, you can pass on the video, as I am about to do here, and we can make this the next viral video success story. Dove even provides a direct link to Facebook to encourage people to pass it on. While the Diet Coke Mentos Experiment video was funny and entertaining, Dove's Onslaught topic is no laughing mater but instead one of a serious and important nature. So let's see how us fellow marketers and empowered consumers that spread content online on a daily basis can really help to get this message out there. Here's the video:
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