It’s been 20 years since Dove introduced its Real Beauty initiative. A lot has changed since then and this year the brand is strengthening their positioning with its latest campaign, The Code. The message of The Code “Dove will never use AI to create or distort women’s images” is being conveyed via a mixed media campaign.
Laura Douglas, Dove Masterbrand Lead Canada, “We’re very excited that we’ll be running high impact OOH at the Eaton Centre [in Toronto] to kick off the campaign and following that with a custom, integrated three-part series on Breakfast television. The overall campaign will be supported by digital and social media as well.”
The advertising runs for two months with the 60-second version of the video airing on TV and the 15-second version is running on social media. In Canada, Dove worked with Edelman and PHD for media.
In 2004, Real Beauty was prompted by the brand’s global research that showed only 2% of women around the world considered themselves beautiful. Society still places an immense amount of value on appearance so there have only been slight changes in the perception of beauty. In its 2024 The Real State of Beauty: A Global Report, Dove found that four in 10 women (42%) in Canada would give up at least a year of their life to achieve their beauty ideals. The study found that in Canada beauty ideals have evolved over the years to be more inclusive across race, orientation, gender and size, but the checklist of appearance ideals is growing and impossible to meet – from looking healthy (81%) to also being slim (74%) and having a small waist (71%) while also being curvy (57%).
In fact, 64% of women in Canada believe that women today are expected to be more physically attractive than their mother’s generation was with 84% of women and girls saying they have been exposed to harmful beauty content on social media. Two in five women (43%) and girls (43%) say they feel pressure to alter their appearance because of what they see online, even when they know it’s fake or AI generated. Consequently, 89% of women and 56% of girls in Canada do not have high body esteem. Among them, 48% of women and 20% of girls experience low body esteem.
Dove believes that AI is one of the biggest threats to the representation of real beauty and says that by 2025, 90% of online content is expected to be AI-generated. Dove vows to continue to stand for “real,” and to champion transparency and diversity in beauty by becoming the first beauty brand to commit to never using AI in place of real people in its advertising.
