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To manage 300,000 creators, Unilever automates everything but the relationship
The ad industry seems hellbent on scaling creator marketing. Adding more creators to the roster? That’s the easy part. It’s the infrastructure — discovery and vetting, talent management and content approvals — that’s likely to cause operational headaches.
Unilever knows this, especially after last year’s declaration to make creators core to its marketing plan. The conglomerate grew the program from 10,000 to 300,000 and execs are deciding which parts of its influencer marketing to hand over to automated systems.
“In most of the places where we are using technology, technology is used for us to augment the human choices,” said Leandro Barreto, chief marketing officer for Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing business group. He later added, “This doesn’t need to be done by a person in an Excel. This can be done by a system that scans the internet…”
Barreto spoke at a roundtable event during this year’s Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity, during which he shared the company’s operational infrastructure. The global company has prioritized finding and vetting qualified creators across the 190 countries where Unilever products are sold, the CMO said.
Automating the grunt work
Unilever is comfortable handing over administrative tasks and paperwork to automated tools. For example, one tool allows Unilever brands to scan videos on social media and find people who share positive stories about its products to potentially use for its creator marketing efforts. The exec did not name the tool.
Leveraging AI as a creator vetting or brand safety tool is becoming more commonplace across the industry. It’s part of the grunt work handed off to automation to then free up internal teams for things like strategy.
Rather than slogging through Google or natively within social media platforms, AI agents can whip up a qualified list of brand specific and safe creators within minutes. Those same agents can catch any past controversies the creator may have been involved in.
“Having AI do the tedious admin work will allow everyone to focus on the part most visible to a brand’s audience — the creativity,” Otis D. Gibson said in an emailed statement to Digiday. Gibson is the founder and chief creative officer at Gertrude, Inc., an independent ad agency.
Goal posts move with creator growth spurt
AI will likely take on more tasks as campaigns keep getting bigger. In the U.S. spending on influencer marketing is expected to grow 15.7% this year, ultimately reaching $13.7 billion by 2027, according to eMarketer’s forecast.
The average campaign that included five to eight creators a few years ago now sees brands asking for 25 to 30 creators, said Jennifer Quigley-Jones, vp of strategy and partnerships at PMG.
“At some point, we are going to have more data and more intelligence, and we’re going to have more trust that is the right thing, but I don’t think we are there yet,” Barreto said, referring to Unilever’s AI adoption.
With the uptick in creators per campaign, agents can handle tasks like brand safety checks, data collection, briefings and document standardization. But the relationship between brand and creator still requires a human touch, Quigley-Jones said.
“That level of automation for content, it works, but it often will drive content to being unimaginative,” Quigley-Jones said. Creators may be incentivized to follow strict briefs for the sake of quick approvals. Quigley-Jones worries this could make for safe content that’s “unimaginative.”
“It’s discouraging innovation on behalf of the creator, because then it will get flagged and it will take longer to get approved if it does at all, or there might be reshoots,” she said.
A work in progress
Unilever products are sold in more than 190 countries, where there’s different cultural nuances, customs and playbooks. There’s also an endless supply of creators, from user generated content to paid campaigns.
“We’re not going to bring them all into a meeting — we’d have hundreds of thousands of people — but we’re building communities,” said Selina Sykes, global vp of digital, social and Al transformation at Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing group.
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