Which Campaign Has The Greatest Impact
Unilever, the makers of Dove, have an ad campaign in place developed by Ogilvy in which a young girl gets blasted with rapid fire media messages about beauty. It is called “Onslaught”. Here it is:
In response to the ad Greenpeace developed an anti-ad which attacks Unilever as a primary cause of deforestation in Indonesia, where palm oil is grown for use in beauty products such as Dove. Here is the Greenpeace ad:
Which campaign is likely to be more successful? There are of course multiple occurrences of both videos on YouTube making it quite difficult to get a comprehensive view count of the real quantum of views for each respective video. I would hazard a guess from reviewing the viewer comments on YouTube that the Greenpeace video has a more vocal and passionate support network.How do major brands develop strategies that put them on the moral high ground? And is it necessary to do so? We believe that one of the problems that faces large organizations with substantial legacy media strategies is that they believe that they can keep on doing what they have been doing successfully in the past and it will be successful in the future. As more sophisticated aggregation tools become more prevalent we think that memes such as the one that Greenpeace has produced will ensure that there is a heightened risk for enterprises that don’t think carefully about the consequences of the media campaigns that they initiate.One of the areas of research that we have started to undertake with clients is to research management attitudes to markets and market attitudes to products in order to determine where there are biases that are dissonant. From analysis of the data that is generated it is possible to map quite specifically the point at which customers will become emotionally involved against a brand or product instead of for it. We think that this work can be very valuable in developing insights into how markets are moving.