The Dove Code • Teaching AI What Real Beauty Looks Like
An iconic beauty campaign, redefined for a new era.
Few campaigns are as iconic as Dove’s Real Beauty campaign, well-known for challenging traditional beauty standards and celebrating inclusivity. Marking the campaign’s 20th anniversary, Dove sought to show that 20 years on, the need for better diversity and inclusive representation is still as relevant today—especially with concerns about AI-generated content. The Code: A Dove Film—created by Soko—was designed to bring awareness of the increasing impact of AI on beauty and was established on the key insight that by 2025, AI is predicted to generate 90% of online content. The film presents biases exacerbated by AI in contrast to the Dove-coded imagery, which shows that AI has learned from the brand’s long legacy of portraying diverse women and body types in the pursuit of real beauty.
The film served as an important anthem standing for Dove’s values, though Dove wanted to extend the campaign with a resource that substantiated its message and encouraged the industry to participate in challenging biases inherent in generative AI output. The brand believes that we are at a pivotal moment at the beginning of the AI era, where we can make a change in how AI depicts beauty. So, we had the idea to build an AI prompting playbook and other assets designed to answer the very question presented in the film: What kind of Beauty do we want AI to learn?
Infusing the Dove Code with ethically based generative AI principles.
As an AI consulting partner, we’re well aware that generative AI isn’t going anywhere—and that it’s going to change everything. Starting out, we sought to define how we can take action now to help steer generative AI outputs in the right direction, with the goal of accurately representing diverse communities with AI. With tight timelines needed due to the pace at which AI evolves, our experience design experts worked alongside our research and development team to test prompts and outputs, resulting in a first-of-its-kind guide of best practices.
Achieving this level of nuanced representation in a guide to prompting AI hadn’t been done before, so we needed to test and explore different prompts for various use cases and types of women. For example, what’s the best way to prompt for a Filipino woman with a prosthetic leg and big, curly hair? The Real Beauty Prompt Playbook provides broad guidance on beauty and inclusion, specific information on the power of prompts, and recommendations on how to create prompts of your own.
A collaborative approach to defining Real Beauty together.
With the overarching Dove Code campaign designed and developed by Soko, we collaborated closely with Dove’s roster of partners and sought external specialists where relevant, including female AI experts and a global community of body confidence experts to ensure we brought together best-in-class thinking across every aspect of AI. We also had guidance from the AI researcher who discovered the key insight used in the Dove Code film, ensuring continuity between the questions asked by the film and the answers provided in the playbook.
Beyond the playbook itself, we continued to support the Dove Code with an above-the-line out-of-home (OOH) campaign, including a CGI-rendered OOH ad celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Dove Real Beauty campaign on digital platforms. Overall, our efforts helped substantiate Dove’s message about ensuring diversity and inclusion in the age of AI. As one core partner among many, it took a village to build the Dove Code in celebration of the brand’s lasting commitment to real beauty—and we couldn’t be prouder.