Dove turns Reddit reviews of its products into an ad campaign

For a brand that has spent years telling the world that beauty does not need retouching, inviting the internet to critique your product in public feels either supremely confident or faintly unhinged. With “r/eal reviews”, Dove is betting on the former.

The Unilever-owned brand has taken its long-running Real Beauty platform and given it a very 2026 twist. Instead of commissioning polished testimonials or influencer scripts buffed to a high shine, Dove has gone digging through Reddit. Not for praise alone, but for the whole messy spectrum of opinion.

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The campaign title itself is a wink. “r/eal reviews” riffs on Reddit’s naming convention, where every community begins with that simple prefix, r/. On the platform, subreddits function as self-governing micro-worlds. r/Haircare. r/Beauty.

Places where strangers swap ingredient lists, horror stories and holy grails with forensic intensity.

But the cleverness does not stop at wordplay.

Rather than quietly lifting quotes from threads, Dove has pulled Reddit reviews out of the scroll and into the street. The brand has rolled them out through guerrilla out-of-home placements across New York City, alongside digital OOH executions. 

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It is an arresting sight. Beauty advertising rarely tolerates ambivalence. Here, a passer-by might encounter a line that reads like a love letter to the product, followed by one that gently questions its texture or weight. The kind of nuance usually buried three comments deep is now plastered across city walls.

The visual language leans heavily into Reddit’s identity. Avatars inspired by Snoo, the platform’s alien mascot, stand in for the real users. Each Redditor’s customised Snoovatar is carried across campaign assets, preserving anonymity while retaining personality. The formatting mirrors the familiar structure of a thread, making it unmistakably clear where the reviews originated.

Created by DAVID London alongside AKQA Paris and WPP Media, the campaign reportedly invited Redditors to review the product publicly and without filters. That last phrase matters. In beauty, “without filters” is often a metaphor. Here, it is operational.

Of course, there is an inherent tension. Even curated honesty is still curation. The decision of which critical reviews to elevate remains, ultimately, a brand choice. Yet by allowing less-than-perfect feedback to sit alongside glowing endorsements, Dove extends the logic of Real Beauty into product performance.