The Power of Viral Revisted

Perhaps you've seen Dove's new campaign for Real Beauty featuring the little, red-haired girl leaving the school bus followed by images of ill-proportioned, sex-symbol-esque, surgery wielding beauties, followed by the message "Talk to your daughter before the fashion industry does."

Let me start by saying - I am in love with the real beauty campaign. I think it's a brilliant marketing strategy that the American public needs to hear. With the majority of women in this country being a size 14, it is often too easy to believe that beauty is in the heroin-sheik, or the bottle-wielding tiny bopper celebrities. For a beauty company to come out and tell women that it's okay to be themselves, is in genius. It's a long the lines of Jennifer Love Hewitt's rant to TMZ for dissing her size 2 body a couple weeks back, while enjoying her engagement in Hawaii (see http://www.thatsfit.com/2007/12/08/jennifer-love-hewitt-gets-celebs-talking/). But I digress.

The video for Real Beauty is called "Onslaught," just in case you haven't been one of the hundreds of thousands of clicks. This is an example of yet another viral campaign (my obsession as chatted about last week), and a rather successful one at that. But, when dealing with video campaigns you're often going to get tied into youtube.com and have video comments back. A downside to this type of advertising is that the response may not always be 100% positive, and can indeed be enlightening. Please see what I found on my viral tracking today.