Cheryl Hunter (shelflife at marklives.com)’s weekly pick of all things new — product, packaging, design, insight, food, décor and more!

• Dove recommits to Real Beauty
• Shazam launches augmented reality for brands
• Techsys uses facial recognition for rewards

Beauty at its best

Dove has taken another step in its mission to help women realise their personal beauty potential with the announcement of the Dove Real Beauty Pledge. This is a further commitment to create a world where beauty is a source of confidence, not anxiety.

To mark the launch of the Dove Real Beauty Pledge, Dove partnered with renowned photographer and creative director Mario Testino, famous for taking candid shots of women. Testino and his London-based creative agency, MARIOTESTINO+, photographed 30 portraits showcasing the beauty of women from around the world. All the images were shot according to the Dove Real Beauty Pledge and feature 32 real women and girls, aged 11 — 71, from over 15 countries, including South Africa. The portraits make up part of the Dove Real Beauty Showcase, celebrating 60 years of Dove.

Testino says: “The way Dove empowers women to celebrate their own unique beauty has long resonated with me. I have always taken the same approach with my pictures. A photographer has a choice — they can take a picture and make it about themselves by using avant-garde techniques, sometimes capturing the weakness in women, or they can choose to give their picture over to the woman in front of the lens by making her look herself and feel her most powerful.”

Says Dove global vice president, Sophie Galvani: “In 2017, the beauty landscape is wildly different to what it was in 2004 when we launched the Dove Campaign for Real Beauty; however, our commitment to redefining beauty hasn’t changed.”

The women featured in the Dove Real Beauty Showcase include Vicki, a retired medal-winning Paralympian from the UK who had to change her definition of beauty after losing her leg to cancer; Paola, a football lover who started her own club for girls in her hometown of Mexico City after she noticed many young girls drop out of sports as they entered their teenage years; and Luyanda, a chartered accountant from SA who always struggled with her appearance, despite her successful career.

The full Dove Real Beauty Pledge and the Dove Real Beauty may be viewed here.

dove.co.za • Facebook • Twitter
mariotestino.com • Facebook • Twitter

Get Shazammed

Popular app Shazam has announced the launch of a massively scaled augmented reality (AR) platform for its brand partners, artists and hundreds of millions of global users today, Tuesday, 6 March 2017.

Since launching visual-recognition functionality in 2015, Shazam has partnered with brands and artists to connect its users to custom content, and AR marks the next step forward in this offering. Shazam is reportedly used by hundreds of millions of people each month to connect to the world around them. Building on its pioneering leadership in music identification, the app has been downloaded over 1bn times and in over 190 countries, and users Shazam over 20 million times each day.

According to Shazam CEO, Rich Riley, the new platform can bring marketing materials to life: “Products, packaging, POS, advertising, events, can utilise the app to scan unique ‘Shazam Codes’ capable of delivering AR experiences, including 3D animations, product visualisations, mini-games and 360-degree videos.

“One of the things missing from augmented reality for advertisers has been a frictionless way to deliver these experiences at scale. Because Shazam has such a massive install base and consumers are already accustomed to using the app for discovery, we have now solved that problem. The possibilities for a brand to bring their products to life or make their advertising more engaging are quite literally only limited by the imagination.”

Shazam AR works with all iOS (Shazam v10.5) or Android (Shazam v7.5) devices.

shazam.com • Facebook • Twitter

Making work beerable

Motivating staff to complete their timesheets on Fridays is every agency’s headache, so Techsys Digital decided to find a solution and came up with a fun, highly effective incentive.

Using facial recognition technology in the door of a bar fridge, the fridge identifies who is in front of it and then connects wirelessly to the agency’s timesheet system to verify that the person’s timesheets are up to date. If they’ve been completed, the platform unlocks the fridge and, voila, the fridge dispenses an ice-cold Windhoek beer.

A win-win solution indeed.

techsys.co.za • Facebook • Twitter • Ramify

Shelf Life is MarkLives.com’s weekly column covering all things new. Notify us of yours at shelflife at marklives dot com. Want to sponsor Shelf Life? Contact us here.

Cheryl Hunter (@cherylhunter) has written for the South African media, marketing and advertising industries for more than 15 years. A former editor of M&M in Independent Newspapers and contributor to Bizcommunity, AdFocus, AdReview and the Ad Annual, she has also produced for various television networks and currently consults on communication strategy and media liaison.

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