This is an editorial pick, not a submission — Talmyn’s own research into a campaign with real, measurable business results, published as part of our ongoing Best Marketing Campaign coverage.
Dove’s r/eal Reviews campaign, built in partnership with Reddit, promoted the brand’s Intensive Repair hair mask using unfiltered reviews pulled directly from Reddit — publishing the first 50 verbatim comments the brand received, positive or negative, with the reviewers’ permission. Instead of curated testimonials, the campaign ran actual, sometimes blunt, consumer opinions across out-of-home placements in New York and testimonial-style films where Redditors read their own posts aloud.
Why this made the list
The mechanism worth naming here is the specific bet the campaign made: that genuine, unfiltered feedback — including negative comments — would be more persuasive than polished marketing copy, in a media environment where audiences have become reflexively skeptical of curated testimonials. That’s a real risk for a brand to take deliberately, since it means giving up control over the exact message being broadcast.
The bet paid off in numbers that are unusually concrete for a marketing case study: reported sales growth of over 100 percent compared to the previous year, the product becoming the top-selling hair mask in the US during the campaign period, and more than a billion earned impressions from the unfiltered content itself. The campaign also won six awards at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, one of advertising’s most competitive juried recognitions.
Talmyn’s Best Marketing Campaign coverage looks for a campaign with an actual, traceable business result, not just creative acclaim. Dove’s willingness to publish real negative reviews as the ad itself, and the sales number that followed, is exactly that kind of case.
