Dive Brief:
- Dove debuted its first TV ad with a humorous angle for the 50th anniversary special for “Saturday Night Live” over the weekend, according to a press release.
- The spot promotes the launch of a reformulated moisturizing body wash by playing on aversion to the word “moist.” Things begin in a conventional manner, with a focus group of women praising the new product, before they have a unanimously negative reaction to the reveal of a marketing campaign themed around moistness.
- Dove is extending the reach of the tongue-in-cheek effort on social channels to generate chatter in the aftermath of “SNL50: The Anniversary Special,” which saw high ratings. The Unilever personal care brand is also coming off of a well-received Super Bowl campaign that was in its more usual wheelhouse.
Dive Insight:
Dove adopted a different approach to make a splash around the hotly anticipated 50th anniversary special for “SNL,” which was watched by nearly 15 million viewers across Peacock and NBC. The marketer, best known for ads dismantling women’s beauty stereotypes, for the first time embraced satirical humor by leaning into a term that is a beneficial quality for personal care products but tends to give people “the ick” when spoken aloud.
The 30-second commercial, which was developed with Ryan Reynold’s Maximum Effort agency, subverts the usual Dove marketing tropes. At the start, four diverse women sit down for a focus group and initially seem ecstatic about the new Dove Deep Moisture Body Wash, billed as the Unilever brand’s most moisturizing yet thanks to a patented Renewing MicroMoisture technology. They’re then repelled by the accompanying ad campaign, which includes a bottle-shaped mascot named Mrs. Moist, imagery with copy reading “So Moist!” and a particularly unimaginative jingle.
Along with the TV buy, Dove is pushing “Moist Humor” on social channels such as YouTube and Instagram. Time will tell whether Dove continues to experiment with comedy, but the brand has kept up its purpose-driven positioning elsewhere. A well-received ad at Super Bowl LIX earlier this month made with WPP agency Ogilvy illustrated how quickly young girls can lose their confidence once they enter their teens. Dove last year saw the departure of longtime marketing executive Alessandro Manfredi, an architect of its “Real Beauty” platform around women’s empowerment that has been running for over two decades.
Other companies have poked fun at queasiness around the word moist. In 2023, Kraft Heinz’s line of mayonnaise — coincidentally, a competitor to Unilever-owned Hellmann’s — petitioned Merriam-Webster to make “moist” its Word of the Year. The stunt included the delivery of a jumbo-sized mayonnaise jar with a “Real Moist” logo to the publishing firm’s headquarters, along with an SEO-hacking blitz to boost the presence of moist online.
