By: Jessica Grose - Anselmo Ramos, creative lead on Dove’s "Real Beauty Sketches" hit discusses the making of a viral sensation. Dove’s “ the [i]New York Times[/i], ABC News, this very site, and in the Huffington Post, where a positive piece about the campaign has been shared almost 40,000 times on Facebook. It has inspired a parody of the original, and now even the blogger backlash to the ad--which
complains that it focuses too much on a narrow definition of
beauty--has itself gone viral. It’s a real mark of Internet success when
even your backlash gets press.
Anselmo Ramos, a vice president and creative director at Ogilvy Brazil, is one of the key creatives behind this ad--as well as other ingenious creations, like the ad featuring a karaoke mic doubling as a breathalyzer as a way to combat drunk driving. He spoke to us about the inspiration behind the real beauty sketches and how these videos were made. “Everything is a conversation really,” Ramos says of his creative philosophy. “Consumers are ready to engage with brands. We just need to entertain them.”
The Origin of the Idea
We got a simple and ambitious brief from our clients: Make women feel better about themselves. Back in 2007, when Dove won the Cannes Grand Prix with “Evolution,” the “Real Beauty” concept was a completely different point of view from the entire beauty industry. Now that the Campaign for Real Beauty has been established, our job was to talk straight to women in a more intimate, personal way. According to statistics, only 4% of women feel good about themselves across the globe. We decided to do something that would move the other 96%. From the very beginning, we tried to look for an idea that could actually prove they are wrong about their self-image. An experiment. We had several ideas, but “Real Beauty Sketches” really stood out.There’s a lot of merit to the clients, because they didn’t approve a script; they approved a social experiment.
Was There A Back-up Plan?
We always say that if you know exactly what you’re doing, then probably you’re not doing something really new. We like to come up with ideas that a) haven’t been done before, and b) we have no idea how the heck we’ll do it. With “Real Beauty Sketches,” we thought that women would probably describe themselves in a more negative way than strangers. But it was just a guess really, based on common sense and women’s nature. It could go totally wrong. When we told the idea to the clients, we said: “Listen, this is the idea. We don’t know if it’s going to work, but we think it will. The only way to find out is by doing it.” So there’s a lot of merit to the clients, because they didn’t approve a script; they approved a social experiment.Finding the Best Artist Around
Casting the Women
The participants where selected through a normal casting session. We looked for women from different ages and ethnicities. And women that could represent well Dove’s concept of “Real Beauty.” The strangers were also selected through casting. The goal was to find nice, easygoing, outspoken people, who could quickly befriend someone and would be able to describe that person later.
Directing the Shoot
The shoot took three days in a loft in San Francisco. Gil would draw a woman describing herself in a day and then draw the stranger describing the same women on a different day. Gil would never really know who exactly he was drawing. The project was shot by John X Carey from Paranoid US. He was the perfect director for the project. He shot it in a beautiful documentary-style way, capturing all the right emotions on camera.Why It Went Viral
