Dove Pro-age
In line with their Campaign for Real Beauty, Unilever have launched their pro-age campaign a few months ago. With print, TV and outdoor, they are doing a full on mass-market approach, using Annie Leibovitz photos of the 50+ women, none of whom are ‘models. Time has a good write up of the campaign. Although the product is not that different from any other marketed as ‘anti-age’, the message they are sending is different to all the other brands.
In its first global launch ever, Dove hopes to attract the 40 million or so baby-boomer women in the wrinkle-war zone with a provocative twist: instead of demonizing wrinkles with “antiaging” products, Dove celebrates them and calls its new line Pro Age.
One of the TV ads has apparently been banned by the TV stations and they are not averse to pointing this out on the site. There’s an overview of the discussion at Blogher. Whether or not the spot was deliberately cut this way remains to be seen, but it does get people coming to the site to take a look at it and then hopefully stay and explore. They are encouraging debate as well on their boards; their topic to discuss the ads has 7 pages of comments currently.
Here’s what I think:
- they’ve built on their successful Campaign for Real Beauty, which was more of a generic brand campaign, with a product targeted campaign against a highly affluent and widespread target.
- They are leveraging the community they have already gathered around their discussion forum and got people debating - which gets used as perfect content for the press, either in agreement or if they are against it.
- they have a some controversy in the advertising, getting people to talk about it because it was edited to not meet the US TV guidelines. That is definitely getting a lot of buzz. (see the Marketing to Women Online goes into how she feels they are hiding the real information in the depths of the site
In general, I like it - it feels far more authentic than many anti-ageing ads, even if it is still all marketing!
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POSTED IN: Advertisments, Buzz Marketing
1 opinion for Dove Pro-age
Rosalind Miller
Nov 16, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I just celebrated my 50th birthday. My 25-year-old son celebrated it with me. There is no one in this world that could come close or even guess my age. When I am out with him (clubs, restaurants, malls) and he mentions that I am his mother (very-proud son) people are in awe. I have been using Dove along with Oil-of-Olay for the past 25 or so years. But I have found that it is not only what you put on the outside but what is on the inside (inner feelings) that has helped me to be the person I am. I am a people’s person and I feel the need to present my beauty to the rest of the world. I saw the episode on Oprah’s show about Dove Pro-Age and that really inspired me. I would like information on how to become a Dove Pro-Age Model.
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