>>Fernando Machado: I end up traveling a lot.
Really a lot.
And while that can be kind of like tedious at times.
One of the things I love is the conversations that happen along the way.
And I still remember like in a recent trip I had to New York, which was like -- I think
it was kind of like end of May or so, I had a very interesting exchange with the customs
officer of the JFK airport, which is kind of like always a journey when I arrive there
with my Brazilian passport.
And it went somewhat like this.
He gave me the classic, "So what brings you here?"
I said, "Work.
I come here a lot for work."
And then he said, "What do you do?"
And then I said, "Marketing at Unilever."
"Uni what?"
I said, "Dove.
I work for Dove."
"Marketing?"
"Yes, marketing."
Then he asked something that really surprised me.
He asked me -- or he said something that surprised me.
He said, "But why does Dove need marketing?
Everyone knows Dove."
I even wrote a status update about it, and people who are friends of me on Facebook can
testify to that.
I laughed at first, but it was kind of a nervous laugh because reality was that I was a little
bit afraid of losing my job right there.
But, you know, as I was heading to the City, I was thinking about it, and you know what?
It's not such an odd question to ask, you see.
Like why do we invest so much in advertising when so many people already know our brands
and, in case of Dove, buy our products?
I thought about it, and the answer is really simple.
The ambition that we have is not really to just create like basic brand awareness or
sell stuff, yeah?
We really want to inspire brand love.
You see, at Unilever, we believe in crafting brands for life and creating brands that have
a purpose, yeah?
In doing good business, we are doing something good for people and society.
Dove, for instance, has always been about real beauty and about real women, yeah?
At Dove, we believe that beauty should be a source of confidence and not anxiety, yeah?
Unfortunately, though, our research shows that only 4% of women in the world consider
themselves to be beautiful, and we do that research across the globe every other year
or so.
So just picture that for a second.
96% of the women in the planet wake up every morning, look at the mirror and focus more
on their flaws than on their beauty, yeah?
And we have, like, guys, seriously a very passionate team of people work on this brand
and we simply cannot accept that.
We want to change that, and we are crazy enough to believe we can, yeah?
So we decided to give a very simple and inspiring brief to Ogilvy, which is our advertising
agency.
The brief was let's make women feel more beautiful Sometimes when I say that was the brief to
(indiscernible) point, because I think like that would be something more rocket science
or like more scientific.
But, no, it was a very simple brief, yeah?
And we didn't give a budget and we didn't plan to do any market research whatsoever.
We want to do it differently, to act less like advertisers and more like content producers.
And we knew, even back then when we gave the brief, that we wanted authenticity to take
priority over control.
The influx of ideas that we got was unbelievable, like I have never seen before.
But one that really caught our attention was an idea that came from Ogilvy S�o Paulo
in Brazil, which was called Dove Real Beauty sketches.
It was a simple idea.
We want to bring -- simple on paper, yeah?
To bring in like an FBI trained sketch artist and show the contrast between how women see
themselves and how others see them.
I will play a short clip for you.
[ Video playing ] >>> Hearing people describe themselves, maybe
there's something about a feature that they don't really like about themselves.
And I can sense that, you know, they're kind of treading lightly on that.
This is the sketch that you helped me create, and that's a sketch that somebody described
of you.
>>> The second one looks more open, friendly, and happy.
>>> Uh-huh.
>>> I should be more grateful of my natural beauty.
It impacts the choices in the friends that we make, the jobs we apply for.
It impacts everything.
[ Video concludes ] >>Fernando Machado: So look, this is just
like obviously like a short clip of the whole video, yeah?
But kid you not, like even when I watch this short clip it still moves me.
In fact, I still remember like when we had the first seven-minute rough cut and we gathered
people around in the office to show to the team, there wasn't a dry eye in the house,
yeah?
Like people were like really touched about what they saw.
Because it's something very personal.
So we knew that we had something very powerful and we were like anxious and excited to share
that with the world.
So on April 14th, we uploaded the video to the Dove YouTube channel in the U.S. and almost
immediately we saw reactions all across the globe.
It started in Australia when a morning show picked it up.
Then just after that, a very prominent blogger in Australia wrote about it, and then it caught
fire, yeah?
Like we were on the "Today" show in the U.S. Huffington Post posted about it twice on the
same day.
On the first day, "Good Morning America," CNN, "Wall Street Journal," the "New York
Times," Mashable.
I could go on and on and spend my whole time just quoting who has shown the thing, yeah?
And as we saw, as we saw the buzz grow in PR and social media, so did our views.
It was amazing to see how engaged people were with the content, yeah?
How they were like sharing with their friends, sharing with their families, sharing with
their communities.
Some people were writing -- were writing essays about it, yeah?
To this day, I carry some of these quotes.
Like I have them on my desk because if I am having a bad day, I kind of look at them to
remind me -- seriously, to remind me of the difference that we can make on people's life,
yeah?
Even selling a beauty product, yeah?
Even selling like a mundane product.
So by the end of the first day, we knew -- yeah?
-- we knew that we had struck like a chord with everyone.
By end of Day 3, we saw the launch of the -- of the first of many parodies, yeah?
The first one is actually the one I like the most.
It's a parody that shows -- like it's a funny outlook on men's self-esteem that aims to
prove to guys that they are less beautiful than they think.
[ Laughter ] >>Fernando Machado: It's good.
We had nothing to do with it and it's really good, I think.
That's my personal opinion.
It really resonated with me somehow.
[ Laughter ] >>Fernando Machado: And that parody, guys,
that first one, has more than 3 million views on YouTube, yeah?
There is another parody that has more than 3 million views on YouTube.
Last time I counted there were more than 35 parodies.
There were parodies of parodies, which is kind of weird, but they exist, yeah?
And I mean when you see that type of thing is that -- is kind of like when you realize
that you have created a cultural phenomenon.
But we aren't done yet, yeah?
We had built like at Unilever what was like our command center for sketches, yeah?
We had like all the agencies and the teams gather together to basically like scale the
thing as much as we could, optimize the assets, and making sure that we are taking the most
out of what you're doing.
In like 48 hours, we translated the video to 25 different languages and uploaded it
to more than 40 Dove YouTube channels across the globe, yeah?
That was like really remarkable, working together as a team.
And we also like did some paid media so that we could create scale in these new markets
as fast as we could.
And guess what.
It worked.
After two weeks, we had 75 million views, yeah?
So we launched mid-April.
By end of April, we had 75 million views.
And as of today, we have between 170 and 175 million views on this video.
Which is insane, yeah?
And it really shows how much engagement people had with the asset that we put forward, yeah?
The other thing that I find remarkable is the fact that we reached 4.7 billion global
media impressions on this campaign, yeah?
Which to me really shows how digital can indeed deliver global scale for you.
The -- I could go on and on, guys.
I mean, we -- like we had the most shared article in Mashable's history.
Like the campaign beat every single hair product I can think of.
Look, this campaign was never a sure thing but the risk that we took really paid off
and we found the constraints of a 30-second spot, we managed to create a compelling and
engaging content, yeah?
I've learned a lot throughout this whole journey, but the three things I want to leave with
you are: First, everything, as you probably know, starts with great creative, and the
key here was that the creative was based on a very powerful and universal human truth
that was completely linked to the purpose of the brand, yeah?
And also, when we developed the film, we made it very authentic.
Sometimes people ask me like "How was it -- how did you guys make it so authentic and real?"
Because it was real.
We didn't know if it would work.
We were ready to trash the whole thing, yeah?
It was really a social experiment.
I didn't know if the dramas would be different.
I didn't know how women would react.
We decided to take the chance and just do it.
And because we didn't know, it meant that we were doing something different.
Second, we were very committed, yeah?
We just didn't put the video on YouTube and wait for some sort of magic to happen.
Since the beginning, we had strategic PR as part of the plan, and as we decided to scale
up the campaign globally, we pegged some like smart paid media behind it.
And lastly, we were nimble, yeah?
We made decisions very quickly, especially like on our command center, and that helped
us ride the wave of interest of the campaign, especially when we were scaling the campaign
globally.
Look, as a marketer, you always hope that you will know whether you've moved the needle
with your campaign and with the things you did or not.
In this case, I'm very confident -- probably "confident" is not the right word.
I'm very proud to say that I really believe and I know we made women all around the world
rethink their own beauty, and that's a moment I'll be proud of the rest of my career.
Thank you, guys.
[ Applause ]