How Dove’s #ShareTheFirst campaign empowered women to embrace authenticity

While our primary research illuminated one truth: that 7 in 10 women globally spend 10 minutes analyzing a photo of themselves before posting, at the same time our global community of creators was rejecting digital perfectionism and calling on women to show the unposed, unfiltered, uncurated shot.

Brief

While Dove is a globally recognized icon for championing Real Beauty, many new and emerging beauty brands were encroaching on our purpose equity in building women and girls’ confidence.

As a brand with 20 years of equity in Real Beauty, the powerhouse behind Dove’s two-decade growth, we needed to get women today to make the connection between Dove and building women and girls’ self-esteem – in a way that feels modern and empowering – not finger wagging.

Strategy

We aimed to reach women around the globe trapped in the cycle of digital perfection; particularly women ages 25+ who our research showed take the most photos before posting.

Our premiere “#ShareTheFirst” moment was with the cultural icon Bebe Rexha—an artist who's spoken openly about body image pressures—to model vulnerability by sharing her own unedited first photo. We expanded the movement around the globe, recruiting diverse creators spanning different body types, ethnicities, and platforms to amplify the message and demonstrate that perfection pressure is universal across demographics. To ensure the campaign didn’t stop with celebrities and creators, we invited women to join us with a simple participation mechanic (#ShareTheFirst).

Creative Solution

The habit of taking 50+ photos and hyper-analyzing them to find one damages women’s self-esteem, as does scrolling through thousands of curated images of perfection online.

Enter, ‘#ShareTheFirst’, a movement inviting women to liberate themselves from perfectionism by sharing their real, unposed, unedited first photos — celebrating the real beauty in the very first shot.

Execution

We launched ‘#ShareTheFirst’ as a global movement across multiple touchpoints:

• Creator Activation: 111 global creators kicked off by sharing their firsts, with personal stories about embracing authenticity.
• Celebrity Partnership: Bebe Rexha joined the campaign by sharing her own authentic first photos alongside curated ones, revealing the reality behind her social media presence.
• Social Media: The campaign centered around the ‘#ShareTheFirst’ hashtag, allowing users to easily participate.
• Out-of-Home: We launched a first-of-its-kind OOH takeover of exclusively creator content at London's Liverpool Street Station featuring 64 placements that blurred the lines between IRL and URL. Each placement held ‘scrollable’ content that gave a vulnerable peak into creators’ camera-rolls and ‘first’ photo and landed on a message to ‘#ShareTheFirst’.
• Earned Media: Strategic press outreach highlighting our research findings generated coverage across mainstream and beauty media concerned about social media's impact on women's mental health.

Results

Earned 1B+ impressions & 1.4M+ Engagements

• 994M earned impressions, 272 articles
• 94% positive sentiment
• Post campaign, both women and girls were -6 pts less likely to say they’d delete and retake a photo if it didn’t look perfect.
• Girls who saw the campaign are also less likely to report they would use editing tools, with a -4 pts drop in both expected filter and editing app usage.
• 2 in 3 women and 8 in 10 girls felt more confident sharing unedited or unfiltered photos of themselves
• Increase in Purchase intent: Girls (+17 pts to 83%) Women (+9 pts to 69%).
• Brand consideration also grew significantly: it is now in the top 2 considered brands for 57% of girls (+15 pts) and 45% of women (+7 pts).
• Perceptions of Dove championing inclusivity rose by +9 pts (to 88%) and standing up for important issues surged by +14 pts (to 89%).

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