Inside Unilever’s AI beauty marketing assembly line — and its implications for agencies

“It’s a different way of working. We used to send briefs off and get content back. Now it’s this agile, iterative approach,” Selina Sykes, global vp and head of marketing transformation, beauty and wellbeing, told Digiday. Sykes estimated that on average, Unilever was using the system to create 400 creative assets per product: “Before, we’d be doing 20 assets per campaign, and now we’re doing hundreds.”

What’s Unilever actually done? 

The system relies on Pencil Pro, a generative AI application developed by Brandtech Group. The tool draws on several large language models (LLMs), as well as API access to Meta and TikTok for effectiveness measurement. It’s already used by hearing-care brand Amplifon to rapidly produce text and image assets for digital ad channels. 

In Unilever’s process, marketers use prompts and their own insights about target audiences to generate images and video based on 3D renders of each product, a practice sometimes referred to as “digital twinning.” Each brand in a given market is assigned a “BrandDNAi” — an AI tool that can retrieve information about brand guidelines and relevant regulations and that provides further limitations to the generative process. (For the tech heads, it does this using a cloud-based platform that combines LLMs, RAG frameworks and REST, or representational state transfer, APIs.)

Sykes said the system would not be used to create any images of people: “We’re not currently doing any human AI generation. We’re doing it all around the product.” She added that the company had used the system to produce creative assets 30% faster than its previous way of working, while other measures of advertising effectiveness such as video completion rate (VCR) and click-through rate (CTR) had doubled. 

Sykes didn’t provide an estimate of the cash savings associated with the production efficiencies, but Unilever will be aiming for double-digit percentage savings on budgets. Per Medialink, advertisers and agencies that have adopted AI into their processes have cut their creative production spending by 27%. And given that Unilever is one of the planet’s largest advertisers spending £7.8 billion ($10.42 billion) on marketing last year, per its 2024 financial results, even small figures imply significant cost reductions.

AI Beauty Studio hasn’t just been an investment in tech for Unilever. It’s meant committing to the time required to train and organize teams, too. The company first began working with Brandtech back in 2023, and began testing Pencil in first quarter 2024; much of the last year was spent designing and then administering Beauty AI Studio alongside in-housing specialist Oliver. And 25,000 staff have been given “AI fluency training” so far.

So, what does this mean for creative agencies?

At one point, Unilever had roughly 3,000 agencies on its global roster. But it’s spent much of the last decade working to reduce that figure in 2024, when it consolidated much of its beauty and wellbeing business with British holding company WPP. (Its media business remains scattered across a wide swath of shops, however).

Gartner analyst Nicole Greene said that advertisers are likely to opt for “hybrid” approaches to AI implementation, using agencies as vanguards of AI rather than jumping into the breach themselves. Major agency groups like WPP and Dentsu have each made AI-enabled production shops key parts of their offerings, emphasizing the capabilities of their respective Hogarth and Tag units.

Still, guidelines around responsible use of the tech, transparency with consumers over AI usage, data siloes and an uncertain regulatory environment are all holding advertisers back from further implementation, Green said. Despite a 2024 Gartner study found 30% of marketing leaders planned to shift more marketing work in-house over the next 12 months, another study by the consultancy suggested that only 62% of marketing staffers have had training using generative AI.

For Forrester principal analyst Jay Pattisall, those stumbling blocks might actually “decelerate” brands hoping to in-house. “You’ll need the agency to implement, you’ll need the agency to run, you’ll need the agency to transfer and train, and that takes time,” he said. Several CPG clients, including General Motors, Mondelez and Coca-Cola have opted thus far to outsource AI production capabilities to their agency partners (Monks, Publicis, Accenture and WPP for the record) rather than drag them indoors, Pattisall noted.

That arrangement might not hold forever, though. In the long-term, agencies might find themselves asked to “hand over” to an in-house unit augmented by AI, Greene said. In that moment, questions over remuneration and the fundamentals of the already precarious agency business model will become critical.

And not every creative or production agency has the tech, dev or cash available to the Brandtechs, Omnicoms or WPPs of the world. “This type of scenario, where you’re substituting a SaaS platform for production capabilities and using in-house employees to man the platform, will deter from some of the production revenues that that agencies are are accustomed to,” said Pattisall.

Sykes was careful not to suggest Unilever’s AI assembly line might reduce the work going for agencies. 

“We see generative AI as an aid, not a replacement. In some cases, it will help to free up time for people to dedicate to the more human elements of the creative process,” she said in a follow-up email. “We’re proud to partner with a world-renowned roster of creative agency network holding groups, independent agency teams and key technology platforms learning and building capabilities together.”

Brandtech too, are keen to emphasize they won’t be selling other clients a “cookie cutter” approach in the shape of Unilever’s solution. “The model of transformation takes a slightly different shape in different places,” said Rebecca Sykes, partner at The Brandtech Group [and no relation to Unilever’s Sykes].

But should similar setups end up the norm among heavyweight advertisers – Brandtech already has a similar relationship with Google – alarms bells are going to start ringing in Brooklyn and Shoreditch.