“Get ready with me” videos have become a social media staple and a frequent tactic of marketers spanning cosmetics, grooming and fashion brands, including the likes of E.l.f., True Religion and Dr. Squatch. But what about the night after getting ready, when the makeup goes down the drain, the clothes go in the laundry and all that’s left are memories of the evening?

That is the focus of Dove’s new global campaign, “Unready for Anything,” in support of its Beauty Bar product. Created by Ogilvy New York and Ogilvy UK, the effort is the latest output from a decades-long relationship between agency and brand dating back to David Ogilvy’s original work on the Beauty Bar for its 1957 launch.

“Unready for Anything,” which will run as out-of-home activations and in digital, social media and print channels, comes to life as a single close-up image of the Dove Beauty Bar on a bathroom tile, covered in suds and detritus related to specific holidays. 

While the Unilever brand has been an Ogilvy client for many years, the agency has usually focused on brand work like the “Real Beauty Sketches” and “Dove Evolution” campaigns, not product work like this time around. The process kicked off from a simple brief from the brand: How can you make the Dove Beauty Bar iconic?

Borderless creativity

For Ogilvy, which seeks “borderless creativity” from across its global network, the brief led to more than 600 ideas from around the world. The regional leads whittled down a list of 200 finalists to the winning idea, which was submitted by the New York office and selected because of its simplicity.

To capture the bar’s iconicity, Ogilvy set rules for the campaign: it would shoot the bar as a portrait — not a product — and do it practically, no matter how “tempting” it would be to use artificial intelligence (AI) and other computer-generated imagery.

“An idea is only great if it looks great,” said Rafael Rizuto, Ogilvy’s chief creative officer for North America and an art director by trade.

The campaign launched at the stroke of midnight on New Year's Eve with a Beauty Bar surrounded by the glittery decorations of New Year's celebrations, with a 3:22 a.m. time stamp. The yearlong campaign includes a suite of executions, including ones around St. Patrick’s Day, Cinco de Mayo and Pride Month. 

By focusing on the bar, the campaign trusts customers to use their imagination about what transpired on each holiday. As an explanation, Rizuto paraphrased a famous quote by David Ogilvy: “Don't treat the consumer as an idiot. [They’re] your wife or your husband.”

Influencers and inclusivity

Along with the portraits in print and OOH, “Unready for Anything” includes a social campaign that features influencers showing off their “get unready with me” routines by posting their own Beauty Bar photos. In that way, the creative and the influencer content are more connected than other campaigns where influencer elements often feel tacked on, even if the content doesn’t necessarily feel like “matching luggage” across channels.

“We need to think about the right creative for the right mediums,” Rizuto said. “Our social is how we interact with the influencers and now how they shoot. We are not retouching it. We are using the way they do it.”

The product focus is also a shift for Dove, which has become known for leading the way on purpose-driven brand work, like its long-running “Real Beauty” platform. But by making the bar the hero of the creative and not a person, the ad is in some ways more inclusive: The Beauty Bar is in the eye of the beholder.

“It tells a story without showing any person,” Rizuto said. “It’s putting the bar at the center of everything, so you can tell an entire story — what that woman did the night before — by just showing the soap.”