How Unilever is Spending Half its Budget With Creators
The era of the 'Co-founder' brand/creator arrangement
While overall ad spending with creators is clearly on the rise, it’s still not that easy for individual brands to allocate budgets at a high level in a universe where there are literally millions of options.
That’s why it was more than eye-opening back in March when Unilever’s incoming CEO Fernando Fernandez announced that the marketing giant plans to spend 50% of its media budget with creators - while upping the number of creators the company works with 20x.
In a medium that is not exactly programmatic, that’s not easy to do - especially considering that Unilever doles out roughly $10 billion a year on media. That’s feels like a lot of custom integrations with YouTubers and TikTokers.
How is Unilever doing it? I had Selina Sykes, VP and Head of Digital Marketing & Social First, Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing, on my podcast this week to help shed some light on the company’s macro creator strategy, the structure it has put in place to ramp up its social spending, and what’s potentially in her way.
For starters, messaging and creative execution have to be social-action oriented. (There is more burden on the message than the media plan).
Unilever’s 50% pledge “reflects a shift in how kind of society and marketing is moving as a whole,” Sykes said. “And for us, it's the realization that you need to be relevant today. You need to create brands that are not just seen, but are shared by others and that are talked about by others.”
If you think about it - that warrants a very different way to think about role of advertising, and what a media placement is supposed to achieve. It’s less about exposure and storytelling, and more about currency.
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This newer budget allocation falls somewhere between branding and performance.
Again, Unilever’s spending tactics are centered on getting people to be responsive, but not in a way that is typically driven by performance marketing, and certainly not retail media.
“For a long time, you could broadcast,” said Sykes. “And I know there's been models in between. We talked a lot about performance marketing, personalization. But I think we've moved beyond that to this many to many model, where you really need to harness communities, creators, consumers themselves, to share and shape your brand.”
There are no shortcuts. It takes a lot of groundwork to spend big with creators.
“You need to build an infrastructure to do this.”
“I think you have to focus on what you want the outcomes to be and you have to build models that deliver the outcomes rather than get too tied up in the inputs.”
“It's about working with our partner agencies and markets. It's about working with tech enablement to really find the way that we're able to do that at scale and tap into that amazing creator economy.”
“We vet around brand affinity, we we vet around how they work with their community and who the community they serve and what you know what can they add how can they add value to that and how can they work with us.”
You likely need a multi-tiered approach.
“There are different types of creators.”
“There's kind of the more co-founder type relationship where you're collaborating, you're working long-term with partners. It's about kind of tapping into their human IP. You're tapping into their values, their creative vision.”
Then there's the amount of content that you can really fuel your model with if you work with a lot of smaller creators. So there's opportunities across the spectrum that we want to tap into.”
I conducted my interview with Sykes before YouTube announced its new dynamic ad product, which is designed to help creators swap out brand integrations automatically when campaigns end and new ones begin. This would seem to be tailor-made for a marketer like Unilever, assuming these integrations can be executed in a somewhat uniform fashion. I could see that even changing the way that Unilever creates and executes creator programs.
Yet at the same time, it still seems like the best use of creator dollars is to yield on something truly unique - ideally organic - rather than swapping generic brand integrations in and out. For instance, Unilever found that many creators were organically sharing unique uses for the product Vaseline (like say, cleaning your purse). The company’s scientists verified such hacks in the lab, and then the brand put together a campaign celebrating the many uses of the ubiquitous petroleum jelly…
“We led into the creators and we led into what they what the brand meant for them and their own creative vision and their own creative direction,” Sykes said.
Again, that sounds awesome, but also tough to rinse and repeat. “It's a huge campaign, genuinely creator-and community-led. We were led by them and we were working with a massive at scale group of creators.”
Measurement is evolving. Shoppability is great, but not for everything.
While Vaseline was able to attribute track double-digit sales growth to this effort, not every creator campaign is going to work that way.
“We obviously have business in markets where social commerce is like the leading kind of play when it comes to retail…where we’re creating content that's converting into sale and that's inspiring a network of other affiliates to do the same,” Sykes said. “Just like any sales channel you need to think about your portfolio, and know your mechanism for sale. [When it comes to creators], sometimes you split it up and you have different jobs to be done for different pieces of content.”
Makes sense. The challenge is, when you shift half your budget to one ‘channel,’ you need to make sure that not every execution is judge as having just one job to do (sell stuff right away).