AAA Annual Conference 2019

Yang Feng, San Diego State University
Huan Chen, University of Florida
Li He, Qualcomm Technologies Inc.

As a growing marketing trend that appropriates feminist values and female empowerment, femvertising has the potential to encourage brand consumption and to reduce the occurrence of advertising reactance. Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty is a pioneer of femvertising that focuses on redefining beauty standards and enhancing women’s self-esteem. This research presents a framework that identifies five topics (i.e., ad skepticism, definition of beauty, praise of ad, critical thinking, and other) of YouTube comments around Dove’s Campaign for Real Beauty. The framework, applied to 20,419 unique comments, was developed from a combined use of qualitative textual analysis, human-based content analysis, and machine-learning-based data mining. Results indicated that definition of beauty and praise of advertising were the two most frequent topics among both top comments and overall comments; in addition, comments around these two topics received the largest number of likes. In contrast, comments around advertising skepticism received the least number of likes. Generally, it is shown that public favors femvertising.