starts with a blond girl of perhaps 5 or 6. She pushes back from the camera playfully. “Let’s sit down and I’ll read you a book,” she says. The image fades to a white title page: “Mary’s story.”
What follows is a montage of Mary’s life, first happy and carefree, but—once she’s given a cellphone—quickly distressing. The ad is styled more like a short film or a PSA than a direct case for buying soap. Selfies are intercut with footage of handwritten notes about overeating and influencers demonstrating waist cinchers. The montage ends with a teenage Mary tearfully looking directly into the camera; the next shot is an arm stuck with an IV tube, signaling she has an eating disorder.
The ad has been praised for highlighting the connection between social media and eating disorders and for providing an opening for parents to talk to their kids about the topic. It’s also part of a long series of Dove ads that focus on the beauty industry’s effect on self-perception and self-esteem. By tapping into women’s insecurities, Dove is trying to position itself as a “hero” that can solve not only personal hygiene issues but also psychological ones.
Fairly quickly, promotion turned to calls for philanthropy vaguely tied to consumption, like Home Depot asking consumers to bring their tax rebate to their stores, and to donate it to the United Way once there. Although cause marketing had existed since the 1970s, the combination of wanting to do something—anything—and the exponential growth of the internet and social media enabled this strategy to take hold.