Dove The Real Cost of Beauty

Dove in partnership with Harvard and Deloitte released The Real Cost of Beauty Ideals, a first-of-its-kind study that exposes appearance hate as a silent public health crisis. The impact was clear: Body dissatisfaction and appearance-based discrimination aside from costing the US over $500 billion a year, poses a catastrophic threat to millions of Americans – especially young people.

I had the privilege of leading this multi-channel campaign that brought to life the personal experiences of young people who have lived through the physical, mental, social and institutional impacts of appearance hate. From contributing to initial strategy discussions to establishing the campaign look and feel and everything that went into production, the largest challenge came from listening through the hundreds of deeply personal stories in order to craft our message in the most responsible and impactful way.

Awarded the Bronze Adforum PHNX Award for Strategy & Technique

While working on the data visualization portion of the web experience, I created a comp that inspired the CMO of Dove to request it be turned into a full-page ad in The New York TImes.

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  • Agency: Razorfish
    SVP Executive Creative Director: John Antoniello
    VP Group Creative Director: Michael Emerson
    GVP Brand Strategy: Malavika Rao
    Producer: Amber Richardson
    Director: Anne Hollowday

  • In just ten days, campaign metrics outpaced all expectations:

    104 media outlets
    1.9 billion     potential reach
    19 point lift     in brand power

  • “Eleni's work on Real Cost of Beauty was pivotal. This was not only one of Dove's most high-profile projects of 2022; it was also one of their fastest and most complex. It required extremely thoughtful and sensitive considerations to many topics that were beyond Dove's already-intense set of priorities, including how to center the experiences of young people in a non-exploitative way, how to develop data visualization and buzz-worthy web experiences for a brand that has no precedent for doing either, how to manage a complex film production on a shoestring budget, and how to synthesize an extremely dense and academic research document into an emotionally-charged and simple message and key visual. Eleni didn't lose her cool through any of this. In fact, it was her unique spark of an idea that led to the final Key Visual for the entire campaign!”

    -John Antoniello, SVP ECD

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