The Dove for Real Beauty Campaign

As part of a demanding, highly competitive, and more often than not pretentious industry, the Unilever brand, Dove, sets itself apart by endorsing the “real woman” as its ambassador. Dove has streamed away from the tarnished old tactic of selling beauty products by augmenting the consumer’s desire to reach an unreachable beauty. Instead, the brand has become an advocate for a revolution in the industry’s public relations efforts highlighting the flaws of the current communication model and giving light to the negative impact that it has had on society. Finally here is a brand that not only knows its consumer, but is also listening to them.

In 2006 Unilever launched its Dove Campaign for Real Beauty. An effort to promote Dove’s Self – Esteem fund (a global project consisting of a network of initiatives that help foster self-esteem by providing educational programs to young women), Dove’s integrated marketing strategy revolved around one goal: redefining beauty. Instead of a traditional focus on sales, the new message focused on strengthening its consumer relationship by listening to their frustrations and voicing the call for new, and most importantly real, representation of “beauty” in the marketplace.

The campaign used different communication channels to reach a wide variety of consumers. Print advertising and television for a more passive audience, relying on creative and visuals to draw in attention to the message, versus microsites and brochures, with more in-depth information, for active audiences who may have already had a knowledge base. The most noted and successful effort of the campaign was launched on YouTube in October of 2006. Dove’s “Evolution” video was produced by Oglivy & Mather in Toronto, Canada. The 75 – second spot opens with a fairly average looking woman coming into the studio and sitting down in front of the camera. Two harsh lights are flipped on and the time-lapse sequence begins. Intense music dives the viewer deeper into the emotional appeal. Make up artists, multiple hairdressers, photographers, all working for the transformation. Once the physical adjustments are done, photoshopping fixes the remaining “imperfections”. Through added vectors and pixels, the woman’s neck is elongated; her eye color is changed; and her eyebrows are raised. The product is a strikingly beautiful billboard poster. The video closes with the following quote: “No wonder our perception of beauty is distorted”.

The original message turned its volume up through the viral success of this speechless video.  Dove’s biggest challenge was to derive a message that could be heard, understood, and retained by all women. While other materials for Dove’s Real Beauty spotlighted the everyday woman, “Evolution” flipped the camera inward and showed the viewer a powerful and intense production system that is able to fabricate and deceive. The lack of dialogue allowed the audience to focus on the visual evidence and not be influenced by outside noise such as the credibility of the speaker, and his/her relevance to the subject.

As a result, traffic to the campaign’s micro site increased, suggesting that the video was able to instigate interest among passive viewers. In February of 2006, the Real Beauty Super Bowl commercial resulted in almost 500 million impressions. Eight months later, Dove’s “Evolution” generated more than 1.5 million views in less than a month.  The most remarkable aspect of the video is that whereas the Super Bowl spot cost $2.5 million, the upload of “Evolution” to YouTube was free. The buzz echoed throughout the blogosphere and was quickly picked up by mainstream media channels such as CNN and the Ellen show.

The beauty industry is infamous for distorting the perception of natural beauty. Since the start of marketing and advertising, experts in the field use overworked pictures of god-like celebrities to endorse its products. The negative effect of such campaigns is not unknown to the public. Many organizations have lobbied against the use of communication tactics that promote an unrealistic view of beauty. However, Dove is the first insider to fight against the nature of its own kind through a message that is consistent, memorable, and believable.

Senior Speech 2006

Just read through my senior speech. 

My little seventeen year -old self definitely had some good things to say to my twenty- year old hectic brain... 

Senior Speech

Thais Moraes

             Monday 6:00 a.m. The far off sound of music slowly awakens my conscious mind. The song is just loud enough so that my brain is set of from sleep and immediately demands my fingers to hold the protruding object and terminate the noise that so rudely pulled me away from my quiet place of slumber. 6:15 mom on the intercom- “Thais wake up its six fifteen ". No response. 6:20 "Thais wake up its already 6:20 ". My response – god mom I am up already you don't need to tell me. Lies. 6:30 Thais are you still not up ITS 630.  Maybe I should get up . 635 – shower 640 finally thinking about something to wear. 645 my sister Laura walks into my room, perfectly straightened hair hardcore nail polish on and why not some eyeliner. Me? Colored socks. No make up. Wiggles shirt. And yet I am older than she is. But though she is my sister, there are many things that Laura and I will never share. Perhaps because I was older and my identity was considerably more well-formed than hers when we left Brazil, I have never been able to fully adjust to the Arizona mindset. But Laura has, and I will never be able to entirely understand it.

            There are certain things about Arizonans in general that I will never understand. And it is not until you get out of Arizona that you truly see your Arizona mindset at work. For example,  Daylight savings. Growing up in Brazil daylight savings was something common. No one ever put much thought into it.  I mean why would anyone want to argue it anyway ? you get one hour extra in your day to sleep or do whatever.  its just how it works. twice a year you change your clock to either one hour early or one hour late. In Arizona however, the state takes pride in the fact that its one of the few places in the country that doesn't want to change the clock.   Another example: Have you ever noticed that just after a few drops of rain have hit the floor there is always someone that proudly screams: OMG its raining. The rain doesn't last more then a few minutes but it seems like Arizonans feel a need to tell everyone that it is raining. But I suppose I can't say that I haven't been influenced by this bizarre mindset myself. Since I moved to Arizona, whenever I hear non Arizonans saying cactuses I get truly offended .  Excuse me its cacti.   

            I moved to Arizona when I was 11 years old. When I tell people that I am from Brazil but that I live in Arizona ,  the comment that I hear the most is why Arizona? Why would you move from another country to live in Arizona? Well its not like I picked where I wanted to live. The parents were pretty much like yo we are moving and I was like ya thats cool. My life has been as unexpected as can be. I have attended 8 different schools, in 3 different cities, and 2 different countries. I’ve learned that you cant predict what your future is going to be like. My personal plan was to grow up in the third largest city in the world, Sao Paulo; instead I live in the desert. I thought that the live urban noise of the city was to be forever replaced by the hush quiet sound of the sand dunes; I was wrong. My life cannot and will not ever be "calm" and "hush." I do not embody poise and self-control nor I do I really want to. My life is fun, volatile, one might say a bit disorganized, but that's ok.  The way I have learned to live is to let life happen. After all it’s like John Lennon said, "Life is what happens to you while you are busy making other plans." Everyday I have no set plans or expectations for how my day is going to evolve. Of course the plan of not stressing out and going with the flow ALMOST always back fires but I wouldn't have it any other way. At the end of the day more often than not things turn out to be ok, which is all anyone can really ask for. So stop worrying.

Worrying about things too much is, in my opinion, a huge waste of time. If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it makes a sound? If a person gives a senior speech and no one brings him balloons, does that mean he has no friends? When the teachers approached the senior class earlier this year about this vexing balloon paradox, all that I could think of was that if no one brought you any balloons, it would probably be for a reason, and it’s not as though you would be just figuring out on the day of your senior speech that all of your long-lasting friendships had in fact been FAKE. So, as you can see, my friendships, clearly NOT fake.

You might be wondering – Thais where are you going with this? Well, my life is about doing the unexpected. It sounds cliché, but I have found more meaning in the unplanned, unexpected encounters and experiences that make up my days than in most of the standard, milestone events that are supposed to be the most meaningful. The meaningless, random moments are what shape my days and make me who I am. And the best thing is: you never know when they're going to happen.

During one of my lunch frees in October, Greer, Dania and I decided to go to La Grande Orange for lunch.  As many of you might know, LGO has meaningless merchandize attacking you from every corner. I am naturally attracted to vibrant colors and toys thusly LGO is one of my favorite places to just chill and look through all the stuff they don't sell. For example they have a coloring book for $20 that has a page instructing kids to "draw an invisible man" well duh if it's invisible how you are supposed to draw it. But this particular day I found fake mustaches. With each individual mustache looking sexier than the other, it was an immediate sale. We were going to wear them all day. Nothing looks hotter than senior girls with mustaches, as we clearly demonstrated. Sorry Mr. Martin

My personal appearance is often another area where I proudly live out my motto, "Expect the unexpected." A typical day in the life of Thais would involve dressing in the dark, arriving at the PCDS parking lot, and then immediately regretting the decision to put the tuna fish trench coat with the three color motley shoes. However, it is my personal belief that one should never admit that his or her outfit might be slightly mismatched. Simply embrace the awkwardness of your comportment and then when people tell you, with a slightly sarcastic tone, wow only you could pull off wearing those candy corn leggings the only thing you have to tell yourself is ÿes be jealous world be jealous. But all of this practice having people give me weird looks and ask if I lost a bet, or if my outfit was a dare has taught me a lot about how not to let other people's uninformed, narrow-minded opinions affect me.

I could just show up at school everyday wearing a popped color polo, jeans and rainbows. And although that is in fact the case for some days, My personality is such that I never mind being open for new things. If you don't voluntarily take chances in life whether it would be something as small as an outfit or going to a new restaurant for dinner, what will you do when you are forced to take a chance, with a new job opportunity or which college you will attend next year? In the words of the very good looking Leonardo deCaprio in the movie Titanic, : " I figure life's a gift and I don't intend on wasting  it. You don't know what hand you're gonna get dealt next. You learn to take life as it comes at you, to make each day count."

             PCDS teaches us that we need to drive ourselves in order to achieve a goal. While I agree with that completly, I also believe that part of achieving a goal is the drive along the way. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the one concept I would have you take away from my speech. What we need to realize is that our lives are happening right now as I speak. Sure, in our college resumes we will list the schools we attended and the jobs we have had but really, but what truly shapes us are all of the random, unique, priceless moments and experiences that happen to you along the way. I am the product of my tuna fish trench coat, my candy corn leggings, my part-time job at Weather and Coffee and my alternate employment experiences at the Phoenix Zoo, and bazillion, katrillion other things that are mine alone and cannot be claimed by anyone else on this earth.

So my fellow classmates, as you prepare to enter exam mode, remember: In a week first semester will be over, and you will have five more months of your high-school career to live anyway you want. I am not saying that all of sudden you need reinvent yourself into the social butterfly you never knew you could be, or that this is the time to abandon all responsibilities and live only for today. What I am telling you to do is to take advantage of today and every random, unique, bizarre, awkward and unexpected moment it has to offer. Thank you.

Deafening - From Monuments to Masses

 I often  listen to this song on repeat. Probably one of my favorite quotes and one of the  best instrumental compositions.



"Silence dissolves all objects. It is not related to any counterpart which belongs to the mind. Silence has nothing to do with the mind. It cannot be defined. It can be felt directly because it is our nearness. Silence is restriction. It is feeling without a feeler. Silence needs no intermediary. Sound which comes from silence is music."

Sao Paulo Mon Amour

Came across this flyer for the Sao Paulo: Mon Amour graffiti expo.

The expo was on the 11th arrondisement. The gallery holds a lot of smaller artists and has a very urban architecture. Although small, they had a lot of the main upcoming artists and some of the giants of the grafitti world (i.e. os gemeos Otavio and Gustavo Pandolfo). They had all kinds of medium from traditional grafitti work,  photography, documentaries, etc.

Techno Parade

Need I say more?

From the Latin Quarter all the way up to the Bastille.

8 hours of electro-house music, Axwell float car, and one celphone stolen....

The arena has changed, the consumer has changed; so should the marketer

On July 12, 2009, The Financial Times front page held an article praising the efforts of Matthew Robson, an intern at Morgan Stanley, who enlightened his co-workers with the mechanics of the teenage mind. If only I had had the idea first. The fifteen-year-old’s assignment was to write a report on how social media is perceived by young adults; instead, he wrote a Bible. By outlining the do’s and don’ts in teenage marketing, Mr. Robson did not wow the world with the untold secrets of the digital age. The bottom-line is that the most successful social media outlets (twitter, facebook, youtube, to name a few) gained popularity for having a user- friendly interface; so should the manual that explains it. Mr. Robson’s report cut the analytics from the real potential of social marketing. His work is valued for its straightforward, honest, and clean-cut voice.

The phenomena that is buzzed about in many office buildings has been a reality for many teenagers whose first words were preceded by “<>” and casually ended with “< / p >”(html coding for the start of a paragraph). This past summer, high internships in Wall Street were given to those who could decipher and manage social media sites. But how much deciphering is it really needed to turn advertising into skyrocketing profit?

The desire to be inside the consumer’s daily life has taken marketers to invest millions on consumer behavior research. At every office I have worked at, account managers and creative designers draw up innovative plans to keeping their clients close. But is infiltrating one’s daily routine a tactic of the past?  Models that were once applicable have lost value with the introduction to the digital era. The 21^st century consumer suffers from attention overload and is often driven by emotions rather than attracted by information. Today’s world is filled with multi-dimensional issues, considerations, and opinions. Such complexities have in turn given birth to motley personalities that seek individuality and new forms of expression. In this arena social media has opened its doors with a boom.

The spectacle that seeped into our computer monitors has become an essential aspect of our daily lives. We share photos through facebook walls, blog about our latest vacations, and if you’re chicken from last night gave you the worst stomach pain in the world, no worries you can tweet about that too. The digital age has provided society with a means to personalize, customize, and essentially leave the so-called “legacy”. By exposing our thoughts and lifestyles to the virtual world we are imprinting our personalities into our very own html. Cyberspace has given the individual the opportunity to grow his/her personality into abstract boundaries. Marketers should do the same.

People want to feel voiced. Marketers should therefore work to voice the consumer’s personalities and not shape his/her personality. Globalization has brought a wide range of products to our fingertips, breaking the correlation between one’s uniqueness and brand selection.  By providing the runway not the fashion show parse, social media serves as a cradle to one’s success. From this model the consumer relationship becomes one of dependency.  It is time for businesses to step away from the traditional, the dos and don’ts, the facts and numbers. Marketers should cater to consumer’s needs by embracing the simplicity of social media in order to become a listener to and cheerleader of its own consumers.