So real, it curled my hair.
A Dove story.
Part 1. When I almost died of intimidation in a hotel ballroom.
The briefing was too big for Ogilvy, so it was held in a hotel ballroom. Round tables were filled with creative directors, account people, strategists, designers and clients from London, Toronto, Chicago, New York and Frankfurt. As the big shots walked from table to table to shake hands, I was reminded of the scene in The Godfather where the Five Families meet and the Dons show their respect.
I said so to my partner, Jackie Leak, who agreed.
“Except no one will die,” she said.
“Let’s hope not,” I answered.
We laughed. Kind of.
For many, this was a first exposure to the notion of Real Beauty. For others, it was the culmination of two years of white-paper studies, work-sessions and late-night meetings. I was in the latter camp.
From the New York office, I’d been working on Dove with Chicago. Maureen Shirreff, Chicago’s great ECD, was generous and kind. She was the first person I’d ever known who used the word “gal” unironically and she knew Dove inside out. She took me under her wing (I guess that’s kind of a Dove pun?) in ways I’m still grateful for.
I’d dial into conference calls with Chicago, not getting half their jokes or stories, but Maureen always lassoed me in - “Oh, Deb. See, in Chicago, we’ve had snow for the past six days - that’s why we all have cabin fever.”
I was technically part of Chris Wall’s IBM group, although I didn’t work on IBM — I think Ogilvy just needed a place to put me and Chris said, “I’ll take her.” I’d finish a Dove call and shyly peek out of my office (God, remember offices?) while Chris paced around, gathering steam and audience members, as he told a story about Pytka. Everyone in Chris’s group - from Andy Berndt to Tony Arefin to Tom Bagot to Marc Klein - was funny and brilliant and had something to add.
Sometimes I found reasons to go to the printer so I could leave my office and loiter around the edge of their circle. Having been a good head taller than every kid in school, with red hair and freckles, Chris knew an outsider when he saw one. So he too, took me in, and was kind in ways I’ll never forget.
Every few days, he’d pop into my office to ask what was happening with Dove. At that point, we were gearing up to the big campaign while working on spots for facial cleansers and shampoo. Chris’s interest amused and touched me. A grumpy, rumpled 6’11” man hunkering down to try to understand how women feel about not wearing makeup is nothing, if not endearing.
A month later, I sat in a conference room with Maureen, her brilliant partner Viv Rowden, Mel White, the very lovely Amy Starkman (an account person in those days) and Vel Richey-Rankin, who was as intimidating as Maureen was welcoming. Vel was almost six feet tall and dressed in either all black or all white - slim jeans, tailored shirts and cowboy boots. She wore no makeup, except a slash of red lipstick, which stood out on her angular face and complemented the shock of platinum hair that topped her head. She had modeled when she was young and had the bone structure to prove it.
Vel had zero fucks to give before that was even an expression. She didn’t smile if she didn’t feel like it, which I found thrilling and intimidating, but not in that order. She had no qualms about saying “You call this a brief?” to strategists, and “You call this an ad?” to creative people. She lived on a ranch somewhere without internet and was flown in for big Dove projects. I was in awe of her.
Vel, Mel, Maureen and Viv had worked on a book that laid out what Dove believed, didn’t believe, would and wouldn’t do, how it photographed women, what it stood for, whether it had a sense of humor (it did, but it was witty, not “funny.”) We agonized over lines like “Dove is honest and outspoken, but not judgmental.”
“Well, maybe Dove is a little judgmental, like in a good way?” one of us would say.
“It’s more opinionated than judgmental though,” someone else would say. “And maybe not so much opinionated as clear-eyed.”
“Yeah. It’s big and bold in its thinking but kindhearted and welcoming,” someone else chimed in.
We talked about Dove like it was a person - a friend who fascinated us. I’m surprised we didn’t give it an astrological sign.
The book was white and square and beautiful, which is no wonder, since Brian Collins and his group, BIG, designed it. It was about 75% done when I was invited to jump in. I mainly made edits and added a line here and there. I wrote a few pages that I think made it into the book unscathed. Each page took hours and had to pass muster with Vel - no easy task. I gave my copy to someone and never got it back - a mistake I regret to this day.
Our main clients, Silvia Lagnado and Alessandro Manfredi, were every bit as discerning and hard to please as Maureen and Vel. They were passionate about us taking our time - something hard to fathom given today’s timelines. “Get it wrong, and we create a campaign,” Silvia would say, “but get it right, and we create a brand.” And then, with her steady gaze and tone, she’d add, “We’re going to make this campaign famous.” Her conviction made it impossible not to believe her.
At the time, those words took guts and vision. Because back then, Dove was a bar of white soap that got soft and messy in your grandmother’s soap dish. No one hated Dove. But no one cared about it either.
So there we were in a hotel ballroom. With a brief that Silvia boiled down to one phrase - “Widen the parameters of beauty so everyone feels welcome.”
Steve Hayden - the great Steve Hayden, who wrote 1984, the most famous Super Bowl spot ever, got up to speak. He cleared his throat and talked into the mic. To my surprise, he was gentle and scholarly. Most creative people made more of a scene ordering a salad in the cafeteria than Steve made at that podium.
He talked about what a humbling, exciting opportunity we had. He implored the creative people to be tough on our ideas, but kind to each other. He suggested to the account people that they support even the most crazy ideas. And to the clients he said, “If I can ask you to do one thing, it’s to let your creative team behave like magnificent assholes.” Everyone laughed except Steve, whose blue eyes remained gentle and focused. “They need to be assholes,” he said, then looked toward the creative people. “It’s your job to ask questions people don’t want to answer. To keep pushing when you believe something will work. Be difficult.” He paused. “Because that’s how magnificence happens.” Only then did he smile, as he looked toward the clients. “So, please. Let them be assholes. It will benefit everyone in this room. And this project deserves it.”
We cheered. I teared up.
Part 2. When we worked hard and shopped hard.
During the next six months, Jackie and I marched in and out of Steve’s office, campaign after campaign in hand. Steve killed some, made others better, and inevitably said “keep going.” Jackie and I did a lot of pacing. We fell in love with ideas that we hated an hour later. We talked. Thought. Argued. Made up. Thought some more. We sent each other Blackberry messages in the middle of the night that started with “What if we…”
One day, we walked in to Steve with a tagline that said, “Let’s make peace with beauty.” He was silent for a few seconds, which made me nervous, so I said, “The ‘peace’ part works because…” and he said, “Because a dove symbolizes peace. I get it.” Others might have said that meanly. Steve said it kindly. And excitedly. “I love it,” he said. I’d never heard those words from him and it was all I could do not to leap to my feet. If Jackie and I had been good at high-fiving, we would have been doing it that day.
That tagline was adopted by Ogilvy Toronto, whose clients liked it as much as Steve, but in the rest of the regions, it didn’t take.
Everything about that year was emotional. Jackie, Amy and I sat in Steve’s office a few times a week during long conference calls with London and Toronto. We rooted for each other but every team wanted to be the one with the winning campaign. At its best, it made us better. At its worst, it made us - or at least me - behave in ways I regret.
“Ok, clients are loving the New York work the most,” Steve would say on a Monday, and we’d shriek with joy. By Wednesday, he’d say “Well… it looks like London shared another idea that they’re liking more,” and we’d shake our heads, muttering “fuck.” The next thing we knew, Chicago had a whole new take and then, the next week, it was us again.
We paced around like politicians checking the results on election night.
Everyone’s work was good. Some of it was great. Most of it got killed. Sometimes, it was a case of timing. If a campaign hung around for a while, someone shot a hole in it. One hole begat another. And before you knew it, your perfect soufflé had collapsed. If you slipped something in a bit later, people might say “Huh - that’s interesting.” If you timed it just right, the new idea had enough time to gain favor but didn’t hang around long enough to die.
But it wasn’t just timing. It had to work.
“The Campaign For Real Beauty” became our tagline because it was the opposite of “Let’s make peace with beauty.” It was neither clever nor slick. It was a nuts-and-bolts line to its core. Which is exactly why it made sense. This campaign wasn’t trying to seduce anyone. Nor were its women. They were frank and honest and didn’t really care if you liked them or not because they liked themselves. And therein lied the campaign’s power.
We planned to shoot it with all the trappings of a beauty campaign - beautiful studio, cool music, gorgeous natural light, with Rankin as our photographer.
Casting (my first experience with street-casting) took forever. Our women had to be willing to do press, and were asked how they felt about their bodies, their ages, their hair. It was very personal. As we pored over our selects with Rankin, in the New York office, someone commented on how we didn’t have enough plus-sized women in the mix. Our choices were limited and we were leaving for London the next day.
One of the administrative assistants walked past our glass conference room and Jackie and I looked at each other. Jackie jumped up and marched her into the room. And with that, Tabatha Roman became famous.
We shot the first campaign in London. The day before the shoot, the stylist realized she was short a few things.
“Want to run to Topshop with me, girls?” she asked.
She was asking the right girls.
Jackie and I ran around the store, throwing tops, pants and dresses into a shopping basket.
“Yes!” Jackie said, as she held up a black strapless dress. “They have it in 14 and 16!”
The two of us had done lots of wardrobe together, but this was the best by far. We weren’t shopping for fashion, we were shopping for women.
Part 3. When shit got real and I went curly.
Until the week of the shoot, our ads had headlines about making peace with big noses and frizzy hair, full thighs and small boobs and bits of copy about how it was those very things that made us different, and therefore beautiful.
And then, Joerg Herzog from the Frankfurt office had a different thought. “What if we scrapped the headlines and used tick boxes instead?” he asked. He showed us a scrap of paper with a layout. Next to one, tick box, it said “Fit” and next to the other, “Fat,” for instance.
The thought was that we’d ask consumers to weigh in. Not everyone was sure. Did we want to invite people to “grade”women? Some of us had had enough of being rated on a scale of one to ten to last a lifetime. Others felt that inviting people into the conversation would make Dove talk-able and communal. It made sense. And with that, reams of headlines and taglines were put aside in favor of one-word questions with tick boxes and an intentionally clumsy tagline. I started writing lists of word- combinations, like “Wrinkled? Wonderful?” and “Grey? Gorgeous?”
In my heart, I thought it was the images that drew people in - the shock of seeing women who were bigger, frizzier, frecklier and older than the Cindy’s, Naomi’s and Christy’s of the world. I thought those images in Times Square would have had the same effect with or without the tick boxes.
But I could have been wrong. In this case, I was glad to be wrong.
The campaign was way bigger than any one of us. When it finally ran, I wasn’t sure how much (if any) credit I deserved. I confessed this feeling to Maureen Sheriff and she fixed me with her steady eyes.
“Gal, you gotta put that thought away,” she said. “Your lines were what led us here.” I wasn’t sure, but she was. “Same is true of everyone in this room. We all built on each other’s ideas. Every one of us,” she said. She reminded me of things I’d written. Things I’d said. Things I’d added to the white book.
“And on top of that, you let your hair get curly,” she said. We laughed, remembering a day when Vel had met my eyes during a meeting and said, “So when are you gonna walk the walk?” I asked what she meant. “You always talk about getting your hair blown out,” she said, “and you’re writing all this stuff about how beautiful we all our when we’re real.” She smiled and gave me a “ball’s in your court” shrug.
The next Monday, I sheepishly walked in with a headful of loose waves and glanced in her direction. “I’ll be damned,” she said and wrapped me in a hug that was hard and soft at the same time.
Part 4. When we fell in love for real.
The shoot itself was incredible. One of our women, whose tick boxes would ask the world to vote on whether she was “wrinkled” or “wonderful” was undoubtedly the latter. A stylist introduced us, mentioning that she was 96.
“That’s not actually true,” she said, and the room stopped. Had she lied about her age to get into the shoot? We braced ourselves. We didn’t want to lose her.
“So, how old are you, really?” one of us asked.
“I’m 96 and a half,” she said, beaming.
I laughed so hard, I cried. And then, I kept crying. As each new woman got comfortable in front of the camera, her freckles, her crows’ feet, her weight, her wrinkles, not only came out of hiding, but also, came out to play. To be seen. And celebrated. Every one of us who’d sat on the sidelines in gym - or dabbed at our skin with concealer - or lied about our age - came to truly understand something for the first time that day- we were not the problem. At the end of each woman’s session, we clapped loudly for them. And quietly, for ourselves.
Finally, we had one last woman to shoot and were hoping it would go quickly because we’d been there for a good 12 hours. She stepped out from the dressing room. Her features were stunning. Conventionally gorgeous, she wouldn’t have belonged with our rag-tag group - except for the fact that her head was shaved. Which made her not only gorgeous, but intimidating.
Until she told her story.
She’d been diagnosed with alopecia as a teenager and had worn a wig for years. Only recently had she started to go without one. Rankin talked quietly with her for a while, and then asked us to leave the studio so he could shoot her alone. We hung out in the lobby for a very long time. When we were invited back in, she sat on an apple crate, wearing a robe.
“Should we tell them how we shot you?” Rankin asked.
There was a beat of silence.
“I was nude,” she said with a shy smile.
She explained that they had talked about why she had opted to stop wearing a wig - she said it had been a decision to stop hiding. She talked about how scary that decision had been - how vulnerable she’d felt the first time she went wig-less in public. I said how, when we’d met her at casting, I’d assumed her bald head was a choice.
“Oh God, no,” she said. She paused. “But I did have a choice in how I was photographed today,” she said softly. “And I wanted to be brave.” She looked at Rankin with soft eyes and his smile wasn’t that of a hot-shot photographer. It was that of a kind man.
She was quiet for a minute.
“This is first time I’ve felt beautiful since I lost my hair,” she said in a whisper. A tear slid down her cheek and landed on her clavicle, shimmering like a tiny pearl.
We looked around at the circle of freckled, wrinkly, curvy non-models, most of whom were still there. Champagne was poured. Glasses clinked. Exhaustion gave way to relief. In that moment, at least for me, The Campaign For Real Beauty got beautiful.
Part 5. After all was said and done.
Obviously, Silvia was right - Dove is famous. The shoots and activations done after the initial one (the women in white underwear, Evolution and Sketches, to name a few) are more famous than the tick box ads.
Lots of people have won lots of awards.
Some may feel they’ve gotten more or less recognition than they deserved. Who knows - everyone on Dove works their imperfectly beautiful asses off.
As for me and the people I worked with?
Sometimes we were magnificent.
Sometimes we were assholes.
But more often than not, we were beautiful - more than we realized.
This is beautiful, Debra. What a fantastic story!
Amazing! You need to write a book.