Dove brings the honesty of Reddit to the streets with the Real Reviews campaign

In a move that trades traditional ad copy for radical transparency, Dove has launched the “Real Reviews” OOH campaign, turning the city’s billboards into public forums for unfiltered consumer feedback. The campaign centers on a bold experiment where the brand invited the public to test its most-awarded hair mask, committing to publish the results exactly as they were written. By plastering these unscripted, unedited testimonials across high-impact urban assets, Dove is moving away from the polished “brand voice” to let the community dictate the narrative. 

The execution relies heavily on the credibility of Reddit, featuring raw reviews pulled directly from the platform’s notoriously honest beauty communities. These large-format displays prioritize the recognizable Reddit interface and unpolished user handles, signaling to passersby that the content hasn’t been filtered through a marketing department. By placing these “deep-web” conversations in the physical world, Dove effectively utilizes social proof to bridge the gap between digital skepticism and real-world brand trust. 

This strategy intentionally strips back the visual clutter of standard beauty advertising, focusing instead on the power of the written word. By highlighting both the praise and the candid observations of everyday users, the campaign disrupts the typical advertising monologue. It turns a standard OOH placement into a testament to product confidence, proving that in an age of hyper-curated content, the most effective creative is often the one the brand didn’t write itself.