Advertising has historically sold products by making people feel inadequate about their bodies - and then offering the solution. The body positivity movement in advertising is, in part, a rejection of that strategy. Dove's Real Beauty, Aerie's unretouched photography, the campaigns that followed from smaller brands and charities - these challenged not just the images in advertising but the mechanism of insecurity that underpinned them. The most significant work in this space didn't just broaden the images; it changed the argument.
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Weighty Words (World Obesity Day)
- AVON HMO · Noah's Ark, Nigeria · 2026
Words like Orobo, Fatty Bum Bum and Apati get thrown around as nicknames, and the laughter around them normalises body-shaming while hiding a genuine health issue. For World Obesity Day the campaign renders those street terms as physically heavy speech bubbles, so the weight of the language becomes
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NO ONE MISSES THE MEGA PINKY DAYS
- Femenina · BRO · 2026
Mega Pinky Days is the discount season at the women's shoe store Femenina, and in Bolivia it is anticipated enough to be a fixture in its own right. The campaign runs on that reputation: the sale is already irresistible, so the work simply states that nobody sits it out.
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Many Women In One Body
- Diflucan · 2017
"Many Women in One Body" for Diflucan: a confident woman striding through the city celebrates the many roles a woman plays - the treatment as what helps her feel fully herself again.
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#WeBelieveInThePowerOfLove
- Nike · 2017
Nike "We Believe In The Power Of Love". Nike frames sport and unity around the power of love.
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Confidence Shows
- Lactacyd
The campaign tackles the category taboo of intimate hygiene by reframing it from a clinical, problem-solving treatment into a proactive daily wellness ritual. It taps into the insight that physical discomfort and unspoken anxiety about freshness subtly undermine a woman’s physical presence and self-
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My Eyes Are Up Here
- XYXX · The Womb · 2024
XYXX's 'My Eyes Are Up Here' with creator Vir Saini: an everyday social behaviour - where eyes drift - flipped onto men, using humour to make audiences reconsider something rarely questioned. The insight: the male-gaze conversation lands differently when a men's brand runs it on its own customers.
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Mothermonials #TheBeautyTestStopsWithMe
- dove · ogilvy · 2021
Dove's 'Mothermonials' #TheBeautyTestStopsWithMe: Indian matrimonial biodatas read like product labels - fair, slim, good-looking, listed before any personality - so Dove asks mothers, the traditional authors of those biodatas, to rewrite the script. The insight: the beauty test is administered at h
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Menstrual Cup
- Sirona · 2022
A menstrual-cup education campaign for Sirona (a student project from Rachana Sansad): normalising a product most women have never been taught about, framing the cup as the comfortable, safe upgrade to a routine that has barely changed in generations. The insight: the barrier is not the product but
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Nourishing Secret
- dove · Ogilvy Athens · 2018
Dove's Nourishing Secret series: beauty rituals from Japan, Central America and India - geisha, Mayan and Ayurvedic traditions - bottled, so the wisdom travels without the itinerary. The campaign's joke is the alternative: fly to Paris, then Mexico City, then take a bus... or open the jar. The insig
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Eat Right
- VLCC · JWT, Gurgaon, India · 2017
VLCC's "Eat Right": print that shows the unhealthy parts of an everyday diet swapped out for wholesome alternatives. The insight: obesity advertising scolds; this edits. By operating on the plate the reader already recognises, the diet-plan brand demonstrates its product - substitution, not deprivat
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Surprise Party
- lovable · Filmmaster · 2015
To break away from the hyper-idealized, aloof tropes of traditional men's underwear advertising, Lovable used self-deprecating humor to make the brand relatable. The strategy taps into the universal social dread of being caught completely underdressed in front of friends and family. In the film, a m
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Pantsdemonium
- lululemon · AdLabs LLC · 2024
lululemon "Pantsdemonium". A playful lululemon spot celebrating its pants with cheeky, high-energy fun.
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No Pain Beauty
- Aspen Pharmacare · MIND:IN · 2024
To break from traditional pharmaceutical marketing, Aspen Pharmacare aimed to engage aesthetic physicians at a medical congress in a more contemporary way. Based on a behavioral-science analysis of this specialist audience, the core idea 'NO PAIN BEAUTY' directly addressed the central tension in cos
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Don't Fear The Finger
- LALCEC · Grey Argentina · 2017
A musical, performed by finger puppets, about why men should stop being frightened of the rectal exam. The insight is that the barrier to prostate screening is not ignorance of the risk but a specific, unspoken embarrassment, and you cannot argue a man out of embarrassment with statistics. The strat
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Vaseline Originals
- Vaseline · soko · 2023
To make a 150-year-old product relevant to a new audience, Vaseline needed a fresh use case. The campaign tapped into the insight that people with tattoos consider them to be priceless, original works of art deserving of protection. The big idea was to position Vaseline as the ultimate protector of
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Legacy
- Dove · Ogilvy · 2016
Dove filmed mothers describing their own bodies, then filmed their daughters describing theirs - and the language matched, almost word for word. The insight is that body anxiety is inherited: girls learn to criticise their appearance by listening to their mothers do it first. The strategic problem w
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Unapologetically Human
- Cashmere Bathroom Tissue · Broken Heart Love Affair · 2022
Kruger Products sought to bypass the sanitized, cartoon-bear cliches of the paper category to build deep emotional equity for Cashmere. Tapping into the cultural tension that household advertising ignores the messy, vulnerable realities of our bodies, the campaign embraces the raw moments of everyda
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Victory Swim
- Nike · wieden+kennedy · 2020
Nike built a full-coverage swim collection - hijab, tunic and leggings engineered to work wet - and the film simply shows Muslim women swimming, diving and competing in it. The insight is that for many women the barrier to sport was never ability or desire but the absence of kit that let them enter
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Nobody is Normal | Childline
- Childline · leith · 2020
A stop-motion film in which a small creature disguised as a schoolboy strains to keep his true shape hidden, until one classmate drops their own disguise in solidarity and the whole school follows, everyone revealing the strange colourful thing they actually are - scored to Radiohead's 'Creep'. The
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The Art of Comfort
- Lindex · rounded · 2022
Lindex's kidswear line made the case for comfort by handing the argument to the people who prove it without trying: children, filmed mastering ease in every posture of play - sprawled, tumbling, unbothered - scored to a kids' remix of Fleetwood Mac. The insight is that nobody negotiates comfort more
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Toxic Influence: Mothers & Daughters Confront Toxic Social Media
- Dove US · ogilvy · 2022
Dove asked mothers what they made of the beauty advice their daughters see online, then showed them deepfakes of themselves delivering that same advice - telling their own daughters to get fillers, fix their nose, eat less. The insight is that parents dismiss toxic beauty content as background noise
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The Code
- Dove · Ogilvy · 2024
Dove marked twenty years of Real Beauty by pledging never to use AI-generated women in its advertising, and publishing a prompt that steers generative models toward real, diverse bodies. The insight is that generative AI is trained on the same narrow beauty ideal Dove has spent two decades fighting,
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From Upperselfie to Frontselfie in 2 months
- VIM · M&C Saatchi Tel Aviv · 2016
A gym campaign measures its results in how members photograph themselves. The insight: people who dislike their bodies shoot high-angle selfies to hide, while the confident face the camera head-on, so from upperselfie to frontselfie in 2 months turns a change in selfie style into proof of a body tra
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The Eyes Are Mom's, The Nose is Dr. Gevorg Yeghiazaryan's
- Dr. Gevorg Yeghiazaryan · Zuck&Berg Creative Agency · 2020
Dr. Gevorg Yeghiazaryan, a leading Armenian rhinoplasty surgeon whose QIT.AM brand draws patients from around the world, needed an OOH campaign proving his results look natural, not surgical. The insight: the best proof of a good nose job is that it still looks like it belongs to the patient's own f
Body positivity advertising is most powerful when it comes from brands that are willing to change their internal practices to match their external claims. Showing unretouched images while retouching every image in your product catalogue is a contradiction that audiences notice. The campaigns in this collection are the ones where the advertising and the brand's actual behaviour were aligned - and the ones where that alignment made a measurable difference.