This year is the 20th anniversary of Dove’s Real Beauty, an ongoing campaign that has made the brand a champion for women – a force for good in women’s eyes.
Greenpeace is using the milestone to call Dove out on its force for good reputation in a campaign called Toxic Influence, that puts Dove’s plastic pollution under the spotlight. Dove owner, Unilever, is one the world’s biggest plastic polluters.
To make its point, Greenpeace mirrored Ogilvy’s Real Beauty commercial, with a twist. The film juxtaposes scenes in which mothers and daughters watch clips from Dove commercials and share their positive appraisal of the brand, against clips about the brands’ role in the world’s plastic pollution crisis.
The women in the nearly six-minute film, directed by Alice Russell, were real Dove customers for authenticity. There was no set script, but the participants did know it was a Greenpeace film. It was created in-house by Greenpeace with great care taken to replicate the original film as exactly as possible to create the desired subversion.
The film is running across YouTube, Meta, TikTok and LinkedIn supported by influencer collaborations.
The new push follows the unveiling of Greenpeace’s Real Harm campaign last year with activations outside the Unilever World Headquarters in London and coincides with Greenpeace calling on Unilever to advocate for its call to set legally binding global rules and address the full lifecycle of plastic at the next round of negotiations on a UN Global Plastics Treaty in November.
