Cannes Lions 2025: Media winners /

Dove has won a Grand Prix in Media at Cannes Lions for its Real Beauty Redefined for the AI Era campaign, created in partnership with Ogilvy New York and Pinterest.

To mark the 20th anniversary of its Real Beauty campaign, Dove set out to reshape how beauty is represented by artificial intelligence. The brand launched a personalised Pinterest experience where users could define what real beauty meant to them, selecting diverse traits such as ‘brave’ or ‘creative’ alongside inclusive images of women.

Each participant’s choices were turned into a shareable Real Beauty DNA video and pinned to their personal boards, retraining the Pinterest algorithm in the process. The platform’s search experience began shifting AI results toward more inclusive representations.

The campaign kicked off with a homepage takeover on Pinterest and expanded across social, print, TV and OOH.

Jury president, Dan Clays, CEO of Omnicom Media Group, said in picking the winners, ‘We wanted work that reflected where media is at, where media is going, work that really drives the industry forward... Media is the creative force. That’s what we were championing. It was really, really important lens for us to look through. How is the media driving the creativity, not just the creative message.’

He highlighted several guiding principles behind this year’s Media Lions judging. With fragmentation, attention scarcity and evolving technology all shaping the landscape, the jury looked for work where media itself was the creative force and not just a vessel for the message. Importantly, the jury asked whether the creative application of media resulted in significant, disproportionate, quantifiable growth that you could you could link back to the actual work.

Speaking on Dove’s winning campaign, Clays said: ‘We were looking for brands that really understood the impact AI was having on their sector, but also how they were embracing that to find solutions and to capitalise on it,’ Dove’s campaign did just that.

‘This is a piece of work that took [an] insight and then actually used AI to solve the problem,’ explaining that the team looked for brands ‘that really understood the impact AI was having on their sector, but also how they were embracing that to find solutions’.

He added, that rather than contest the challenge of AI, Dove work with a partner where this kind AI beauty content exists to create a tool that effectively alters their algorithm and surfaces real beauty content. ‘We'd love to see more platforms also working with brands to kind of solve these problems in really progressive ways like this, so we thought it was representative of that,’ he concluded.

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