Dove Real Harm: A Greenpeace Brand Attack

Client: Greenpeace

For 20 years Dove have styled themselves as a champion of women and girls, promoting body confidence with their Real Beauty campaigns. But they hide a toxic double standard.

Every day, Dove floods the planet with millions of items of throwaway plastic. It is choking our oceans, killing wildlife, and fuelling unprecedented environmental disaster. The very communities Dove claims to support are drowning in a sea of single-use plastic, their neighbourhoods dumping grounds for corporate waste. The Real Harm campaign subverted Real Beauty to expose this toxic hypocrisy. We killed the dove logo, just as plastic pollution is killing communities in the Global South. We juxtaposed Real beauty imagery with the horrifying impact of their pollution, highlighting the gap between what Dove says and what it does. Activists took the fight to Unilever HQ, locking on to a giant dead dove, and unveiling a massive ‘Real Harm’ banner. The campaign climaxed with Dove: Toxic Influence, a film subverting Dove’s fem-powerment advertising, hitting Dove in the heart of their brand and turning their brand style against them. The film generated more than 3.5m views. 78,273 people pledged to ditch Dove and 126,202 people signed the open letter to Dove to ditch plastic. Dove’s campaigns may tackle toxic beauty standards, but it took this campaign to tackle their toxic double standard.