No Man’s Blog

A couple of weeks ago there’s been great buzz around the Dove Evolution viral. Here in NMB I discussed the comparability of old vs. new media ROI. Over at Marketing Babylon Uri wrote a great post on users’ respond to the viral and the ripple effect of user created content around the same theme. As he demonstrated with interesting links, the Dove clip drove many web users, via Flickr, YouTube, and their personal blogs, to try and explore digitally manipulating themselves.

[pic via Liat Bar-On]

Now while I’m Dove’s #1 admirer for their campaign for real beauty and it’s accompanying self esteem fund, I think they’ve missed great opportunity to leverage the success of the evolution viral and engage their consumers in a compelling interactive experience that would neatly complement the effect of the film.

Technicall / technological obstacles aside, why Dove didn’t create a microsite, inviting people to play with photoshop-like features and to manipulate their own image like the film and then share with their friends or upload to their blogs etc?  And if this is not possible why didn’t they at least invite people with photoshop to upload and exhibit their own manipulations on Dove’s site?

One of the great challenges of brands in this new landscape is to align their marketing communications with consumers’ trends and desires, and this is a fine example how a brand missed an opportunity to synchronise its communication with the trends of creativity and sharing. There are too many forced User Generated Content initiatives but this one, to my view, could have worked wonders.