• by Steve McClellan  @mp_mcclellan, June 24, 2013

A viral video, PR and social media campaign for Unilever’s Dove Masterbrand called “Real Beauty Sketches” won the Titanium Grand Prix at the Cannes ad festival, which wrapped up over the weekend. The award is the top honor bestowed to a campaign at the festival. The campaign was created by WPP’s Ogilvy Brasil.

The agency started with the research finding that only 4% of women believe that they are “beautiful.” The shop then conducted what it called a “social experiment.” It enlisted an FBI-trained sketch artist to draw portraits of women, first according to their own self-description and then based on the descriptions of others. When shown the different portraits, the women portrayed admitted that the sketches based on descriptions by others were “more beautiful, happier and even more accurate than the portraits based on their own description.”

Without commenting directly on self-esteem issues, the agency concluded that the campaign “provided striking proof that women are more beautiful than they think.”

The supporting brief said that within 10 days of breaking, the campaign generated 3 billion media impressions, including segments on TV shows like "Today" and "Good Morning America" and articles in The New York Times and Forbes.com, among others.

Campaign spots on YouTube garnered 46.4 million views and 1.9 million shares on Facebook. There were 208 million Twitter impressions.

Four other campaigns won Titanium Lions, including Nike’s “Find Your Greatness,” a joint effort by Wieden + Kennedy and AKQA; “Bridge of Life” for Samsung Life Insurance by Cheil Worldwide; Prudential’s “The Challenge Lab,” by Droga5; and “Ten Meters Apart” for the government of Macedonia by Y&R.

Separately, the "Dumb Ways To Die" campaign, by McCann Melbourne for Metro Trains, was awarded the Integrated Grand Prix, adding to the trove of roughly two dozen Lions the campaign collected throughout the week at Cannes.

Further details on the campaigns can be found here.

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