Real Beauty Sketches 1 Favorite 

Dove's "Real Beauty Sketches" campaign is the new face of viral marketing success. The uplifting promotional video generated record-breaking online interest, yielding more than 114 million views the first month. This was thanks in part to the Unilever brand's efforts to spread its message worldwide: Dove uploaded the video in 25 languages to 33 of its official YouTube channels, reaching consumers in more than 110 countries.

"Real Beauty Sketches" aims to underline the stark contrast between how women view themselves and what others see. According to data cited by Dove, 54 percent of women worldwide confess to being their own worst critic of how they look. The video features Gil Zamora, an FBI-trained forensic artist who draws a series of women from out of sight behind a curtain, completing the sketches based on each woman's verbal description of her appearance. Zamora also created drawings based on strangers' accounts of the same women. In most cases, the sketches based on the strangers' perspectives corresponded to more accurate and flattering depictions than those based on the women's own self-effacing descriptions.

"Real Beauty Sketches" struck a chord with consumers, generating close to 3.8 million shares in its first month online and adding 15,000 new subscribers to Dove's YouTube channel over the following two months. Its impact spread across traditional media as well, resulting in an onslaught of print features, broadcast news segments and online discussions, not to mention more than a dozen parody videos. In June 2013 Dove and agency partner Ogilvy & Mather Brasil took home the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity's highest honor, the Titanium Grand Prix, solidifying "Real Beauty Sketches" as the viral campaign against which others are judged.