Release and Reception
Evolution was incorporated into the Canadian Campaign for Real Beauty website on 6 October 2006 in order to coincide with the start of the Los Angeles Fashion Week, and was uploaded by art director Tim Piper to video sharing website YouTube shortly after. While it has remained a largely internet-based campaign, Evolution has appeared as a television commercial in the Netherlands and the Middle East, and in the U.S. inside commercial breaks in The Hills.
Once uploaded, the advert was viewed over 40,000 times in its first day, 1,700,000 times within a month of its upload, and 12,000,000 times within its first year. Even without having appeared offline, the advert was discussed by a number of mainstream television programmes, including Good Morning America, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, and The View, and news networks such as CNN, NBC, and ABC News, with the overwhelming majority coming out in support of the campaign's message. Spaces at the mother and daughter workshops sold out almost immediately, and the total exposure generated through the $50,000 piece was estimated by Ogilvy & Mather in October 2006 as being worth around $150M. Comparisons have often been drawn up between the campaign and Dove's earlier purchase of a 30-second spot for Little Girls during the Super Bowl XL. The Super Bowl spot cost an estimated $2.5M, reached an audience of 500 million, and generated only one third of the boost in traffic to the Campaign for Real Beauty website of Evolution. The spot was also credited for its part in producing double-figure growth in sales of Dove product, and Unilever reported that its overall sales in the period following the release of Evolution rose by 5.8%, up from 3.9% the previous year.
Evolution was particularly popular with critics within the advertising industry, and has garnered a number of awards since its debut in October 2006. It was the favourite in the run up to the Cannes Lions to win the festival's Grand Prix in the Cyber category, generally considered one of the most prestigious awards in the industry. Ultimately, the prize went to three entries: Nike+, advertising the Nike brand, Heidies 15 MB of Fame, promoting fashion company Diesel S.p.A.'s website and products, and Evolution. Evolution also went on to win the Grand Prix in the Film category, beating Pretty from Nike, Inc., Paint for Sony's BRAVIA line of high-definition television sets, and The Power of Wind for the Wind Energy Initiative. The victory attracted a certain amount of controversy, as the jury switched Evolution from the "Fundraising & Appeals" category, whose entries are ineligible to win the Grand Prix, to the "Corporate Image" category at the last minute. Chairman of the jury Bob Scarpelli said of the decision "We moved it into another category because we felt that strongly about it. We were not trying to break rules or set precedents, we just went with our hearts and minds, and asked the festival if we could move it." As a result of the win, Evolution became the first entry in the festival's history to take home Grand Prix awards from two categories and the first web-based advertisement to win in the Film category (followed in 2009 by Philips' Carousel)
The piece went on to win a number of other awards, including a silver Clio Award (in the Toiletries/Pharmaceuticals category), the Film Grand Prix and two Gold prizes at the London International Awards, an Epica D'Or and Gold Prize in the Interactive category of the Epica Awards, among others.
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