For this blogpost, I have chosen to look into the hugely successful viral marketing campaign performed by Dove called “real beauty sketches” from 2013. It is aimed at showing women their real beauty compared to what they think about themselves in terms of looks. A sketch artist asked the women to describe themselves to him and he would draw them according to their description without ever having seen them. He also drew a second picture of them but on the description given from a stranger who had only met the participant once just before the sketch. The result was very powerful as every single sketch accounted from the stranger was more beautiful and looked more like the actual person than the account given by themselves.
It was published on Youtube on April the 14th 2013 and today four years later it has a staggering 67 550 000 views. The film has over 11 000 comments which are mostly very positive, most of them speak about how this video made them feel and reassess the way they view themselves. It also revolves around how they would like to try this out themselves, encouraging others and the emotional responses, the general mood in the comment section is loving and empowering. 
However, there are as always, some critical comments concerning the fact that this is a marketing stunt, that the same company owns Axe which has a completely different marketing approach and just generally being critical towards the authenticity of the message portrayed in this ad. This takes us to two user generated responses to this video which are parodies where men are the subjects of the exact same procedure. The men however had it reversed, their own self-portraits were much better looking (often using celebrities) then the one from the stranger and instead of the caption saying, “you are more beautiful than you think” it read “you might not be as good looking as you think”.
In the mass media however, this ad is usually referred to as one of the most successful ads of the decade and the most viral ad of all time. On social media, the ad was also a huge success with a lot of sharing and buzz going around concerning it. Probably the emotionally powerful message ignited the need to share the video with friends who people wanted to empower and spread the love to. The parodies are also a very big part of the social media feed concerning this ad but since they are mostly done with humor in mind it probably only adds to the viral popularity of the ad itself.
The company in charge of this ad was Ogilvy Brazil and the creative lead was Anselmo Ramos, in an interview with him he puts the emphasis on the success for this campaign on consumer engagement with the brand. He also mentions that his philosophy is that everything is a conversation and that consumers are ready to communicate with brands as long as they entertain them (https://www.fastcompany.com/1682823/the-story-behind-doves-mega-viral-real-beauty-sketches-campaign).
If one were to analyze and asses the success of this viral marketing campaign from a theoretical perspective one would have to refer to the term of spreadable media. Jenkins (2008) argues that a spreadable approach encourages consumers to participate in the content distribution of media due to an emotional response triggering a sense of deep engagement in the subject. A spreadable media approach emphasizes the activity of consumers in shaping the circulation of the media content while at the same time expanding the potential meanings and opening the brand up to new unexpected markets. What is important with this approach of marketing is that the content must speak to the consumers to evoke an emotional response that sets the brand apart and opens for the need to spread the content. The message must express something reflected in the consumers own needs so that they select that message and circulate it. Without the involvement of both producers and consumers the brand cannot be successful in this new viral media environment. The economic success of a viral campaign rests as much on the consumers and their willingness to help spread the content as it does on the producers providing the message. With this in mind it is clear that Dove in their campaign has made use of this theory they have created a deeply emotional message that gets responses from a wide target group. When the consumers feel an emotional attachment to the message they feel the need to share it with their friends which is a crucial part to a spreadable media approach. The powerful message also encourages people to make alterations to it in the form of parodies and other user generated content creating even more buzz and sharability around the campaign.
This type of marketing can also be linked to the term stickiness, which in its essence means that a message is designed to engender deep audience engagement and which might motivate them to share it with others. It is basically material that people want to spread however, when applied to online business the term stickiness it has excessively been used to centralize the audience presence to a single online location to generate sales and the opportunity to measure traffic concerning the message. So even if this message is increasingly designed towards a given target group with a deep audience engagement provided by the professional production and directing of this ad its spread and popularity online lies on the basis of spreadable media content and not sticky (Jenkins, 2013).
Sources:
Jenkins, H., Li, X., & Domb, A.
(2008). If it doesn’t spread, it’s dead. Creating Value in a Spreadable Marketplace. Retrieved from: http://www.convergenceculture.org/weblog/2010/04/conver gence culture consortium.php
Jenkins, H., Ford, S., & Green, J.
(2013). Introduction: Why Media Spread. In Spreadable media: creating value and meaning in a networked culture (pp. 1-46). New York; London: New York University Press. Retrieved from http://nyupress.org/webchapters/jenkins_intro.pdf.
https://www.fastcompany.com/1682823/the-story-behind-doves-mega-viral-real-beauty-sketches-campaign
Links to videos:
Dove real beauty sketches:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XpaOjMXyJGk
Parodies: