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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. This episode is brought to you by Blockboard. Running high quality ad campaigns used to mean big teams, big budgets, and a lot of complexity. BlockVantage changes that. AI does the heavy lifting so you can launch campaigns in minutes across screens, including tv, with no media buying expertise required. And every impression is verified before you pay. No black boxes. Best results that you Can Trust. Visit myblockboard.com. Hello. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Digiday Podcast. I'm your co host, Kameka McCoy, senior marketing reporter here at Digiday, reporting to you live on from Cannes. I think it's fair to say at this point that the creator presence at Cannes lion, at least from my perspective at the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity, is hard to miss. There's so many of them and they're not just perched on panels anymore. They're walking amongst us along the quasset. And they're here in droves, both big and more niche, to meet with brands and to strike deals. Which is a really nice backdrop for our conversation, which I've got a guest today, Selena Sykes, a global VP of digital, social and AI transformation for Unilever's beauty and wellbeing. Hi, Flynn, how are you?
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B
Yeah, I'm great. Thanks for having me.
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A
I'm so excited to talk to you because like I said, the creators have a really, really big presence this year. And you guys as CEO earlier this year really put the industry on notice with this big plans to kind of scale from 10,000 creators to 300,000 creators across the company. But from your point of view, why make that investment now, Right? What were the signals there as opposed to three, four, five years ago?
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B
I think firstly, we have been moving to this space for some time. So we've seen for a long time that where people's attention, where relevance is built, where there's conversation, where communities are forming, has been shifting for some time, as we've all seen, with the rise of social media platforms into these spaces. And through that, we've seen this incredible growth of the communities creating their own content. You know, if you look at the beauty content that's available, say on something like YouTube, 86% of it is coming from creators, which means only 14% of it is coming from brands. Yeah, and we've seen that for a long time. So this hasn't been a massive pivot. It's been something that we've been growing as the attention and the conversations have been moving into these social spaces as, as creators, the creator economy has been growing. We've been building this Capability. So for a long time, especially in my area of beauty and wellbeing, we've been investing in building our understanding of this space, learning and starting to build our brands in this space. And I think what our CEO was talking about as he went out there is like, you know, now we've reached a point where this is really not a channel.
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A
Yeah.
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B
You know, we can't look at influencers as a media channel or a transaction. This is about a new marketing model. And something like I and my CMO is really passionate about is actually, if you really think about it, the what of marketing, the fundamentals. You want to reach people, you want to get them to think that the brand is relevant to them and their lives and their needs and then you want them to buy the brands.
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A
Yeah.
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B
That is awesome. Always going to be true. Like always. Those are the job to be done as a marketeer. And you know, it could happen in a single moment on TikTok shop.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Or it could happen in a more slow way as it did in the, in the days gone by. But we really believe that if we stick with those fundamentals, but see what's changing. Like the how is moving and changing at incredible pace. Never seen anything like it. That's where we're trying to really move fast and build these capabilities. And that where. That's where that statement came from in terms of like the what is still really fundamental to us. But we appreciate that the how is changing. We're moving with that and we're making the right choices to make sure that our brands keep growing in those spaces.
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A
Absolutely. Now, Unilever, obviously massive company with lots of different brands in its portfolios. Right. With your specific. I want to call it a beat because I'm a reporter. Vertical.
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B
Yeah, vertical. Yeah.
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A
Beauty and wellbeing. I imagine the CEO spoke right broadly, but for your vertical. Right. What does the approach to creators then look like? Is it also half of the spend and 300,000 creators or what does that look like specifically for you guys?
- [04:42]
B
Yeah. In beauty and well being, this is definitely a space that creators are really engaged with. Yeah. You know, like, I think anyone who goes on social media, that that content, that conversation is extremely prominent and it's changed the category in many ways. One way it's changed the category is we've never had a group of people buying our brands that know so much about the beauty industry and are so informed and are bringing us information about what they want and what they need and knowing exactly what ingredients are in things. So the creators have really Changed the face of beauty. So it has had a huge impact and you know, and wellbeing is an even bigger space in that sense. Like if you look at the broadness of well being, of longevity, of how people are investing in themselves, you it's a huge conversation from those creators. So yeah, in our vertical in my area, this has been a huge growth in terms of therefore how we're leveraging that to build our brands. We still have very much have principles of like, different markets are different even within our portfolio, different brands are different. Even within a brand and a market you might have a different job to be done depending on where the brand is, you know, where you are in your cycle, what's going on in, with our competitors or in the market. So I think we, we try and just have this really clear view of the outcomes. Like what's the job to be done? What are the fundamentals that we're trying to drive around reaching people, about persuading people, about converting people and then looking okay today with the how you do that, what does it mean for in this brand? And you're right, often times creators play a huge role in that. But I wouldn't say there's a universal number that I would do. There's an average over Unilever. But we very much start with how can we drive growth? Like I say, creators play a huge part in that.
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A
Yeah, what's the flexibility that you guys have here? Right. How do you determine how many creators to work with? Like do you get 10,000 of the 300,000 or how does that kind of differ vertical by vertical?
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B
So we start with the brand and we say, who is this brand? How is this brand showing up? As we do that, we start to understand the relevance that this brand can have to different conversations, different communities, and therefore different creators. As you start to do that, you, you start engaging with creators. And something I really like to explain is like there's no such thing as a, it's not a single dimensional term creator. There are so many different types of creators and I know you feel the same way. Like there are creators that are celebrities, there are creators that are celebrities within their community because I call those people the tastemakers or the like gatekeepers of culture because they are within their communities, really being looked up to and setting the tone and generating, you know, thought leadership or being a kind of a beacon to their community. And then there are every day on the other end of the spectrum, there are everyday creators who just want to be part of this and they have something to say A that's meaningful to them and they want to post about it and they want to make videos or take photos. And I think that whole side of it's not about content consumption, it's about content creation. Being part of this is a really cool thing and a really. A really enriched kind of space for us to start to, like, explore and get involved in. So with the, you know, how many do we work with and those kind of questions, it really depends on all of those things. I can't say. Like, there's a number that we go after. We obviously know what we need to do to grow. So we obviously look at, like, what kind of reach can we get and, you know, what kind of conversion can we get. And we have a lot of data around return on investment, around the scale that we need to achieve to do that. But it starts from a place of like, who's the brand? Where's the brand going to show up in these conversations? And then you start to see the scale.
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A
Yeah, that's. I want to dig deeper into that because I would imagine that that's at least three players here in addition to the creators, where it's your team, technology partners. Right. And then agencies. Talk to me a little bit about how you guys divvy up tasks to scale this.
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B
Yeah.
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A
Between them.
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B
Funny, I wouldn't use the word divvy, because what I see is it's like a huge collaboration. It used to be nice when you could keep people in their lanes. It's like, that's your lane, do that. That's your lane, do that. Now, obviously, everyone comes to that conversation with different expertise.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Which is great. But it's hugely collaborative. To get the best outcomes, you need to have everyone, you know, part of. Part of the planning and part of the execution.
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A
So does that start with, like, you guys come up with the brief, everybody sits down at the table together. Weekly meetings. If that's like an everyday look, what does that kind of look like for you guys?
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B
So to get into the detail, it can be different.
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A
Okay.
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B
So we can have a situation where we're picking up on what the creators are saying. So it's absolutely not come from us, but, like, there's this thing happening. So Vaseline verified. Great example of that. We had a brand that was doing well, and within that portfolio, we had a product called Vaseline Petroleum Jelly, which was like our oldest kind of most core part of that whole brand, Triple
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A
Platinum in my house.
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B
Brilliant. But it's interesting because as a brand, you would say we had, for example, we have this incredible product in our Vaseline portfolio called Glue to Hire, which is an innovation that we launched, which if you've never used Vaseline Gluta higher, I need to get you some. It's the most incredible skincare products. Yeah, I really like game changing. I love it. So we had this amazing innovation. It's doing really well, growing really well. But then there's always a conversation about the petroleum jelly. So that's, I'm just saying it's an example of when it didn't start from a brief from us going, we must drive petroleum jelly. We had some very successful and we continue to have successful other parts of our portfolio. But through listening to the creators, through really being humble enough to say there's something that means something to these people about our brand that we have not appreciated. And the more we got into that and started to say, okay, what value can we add to that conversation? Which was verifying or not verifying the hacks. For everyone who doesn't know the Vaseline Verify campaign, look it up. Because it's a great case study in this. And that very much started from the community and we leveraged it. And then this year we, we brought the next stage of that evolution, which is called Vaseline Originals, where we went back, like really back to who were the creators that first, first came up with some of these Vaseline hacks, these hacks that like you say, households across the world use, who were some of the very first creators that talked about these online, going back to 2008, really long time ago. Finding those creators, collaborating with those creators, building products with those creators of those hats into their products and then building such a deep collaboration with them that they're going to be rewarded through percentage of sales.
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A
Okay.
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B
15% of the sales of those products will go to those creators. And I can't tell you how much this is walking the talk in their eyes.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Then being like, not only are you loving my idea, you're giving me like a percentage of sales. Because you're recognizing the role and the co authorship that I've played in co authoring your story on Vaseline. Yeah, you actually bothered to really find out who originated this idea and who first made the content about it. And we went through a very rigorous process to do that. And that means so much to them. Because one of the things, if you create content, that sense of like not being copied and being rewarded for your creativity and your originality is so important, that's why we call it Vaseline originals like the OGs.
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A
Well, now you're touching on something about creators moving from being a media buy to being a brand partner here. 100%. When you talk about, like, sharing, you know, the revenues and the proceeds and things like that, how often is that standard and you guys scaling up creators?
- [12:25]
B
Yeah. So that this is something that we're innovating in terms of how we're working with creators and obviously with Vaseline Originals, it's a very specific case because we're building products from their hacks and it's part of the Vaseline movement that's been there. But like I said, it can also be different. It could also be. I'll give you another example. We just relaunched one of our amazing brands, Tresemme, in the uk.
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A
Yes.
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B
And this is a product that you just. You'd be surprised at how amazing it is until you use this Tresemme product. And I've also used this myself. It, like, really blows your mind how good the product is from Tresemme. So this was one where we were like, we know if we put this in the hands of creators, they're gonna be really blown away about the quality of this product. So we're. So this is where it almost came from us, the insight of, like, we even from R and D Lab, going, this is a campaign where the job to be done is get people to really reappraise, resume, really see how incredible this new relaunch of the brand is and how the products are incredibly. Like, they perform incredibly well in terms of your hair, your. The styling of your hair and the condition of your hair. So this was. This was an example where we went to creators and we gave them the product. So we went to every. These. These, we call them nanos, but they're like everyday UGC people that want to start creating content and do create content.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But it's. They're not like celebrities or professional influencers. And we sampled loads of the product and we built this community of them and we said, we just love you to make content about this. These are some of the things. Let us tell you a bit about how we created these formulations. Let us tell you about what we think the brand stands for. Let us tell you a bit about how to make great content, because you guys are starting your creator journeys. And all these people loved it because they want to be great creators. And they're like, this is great.
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A
Cool.
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B
Like, let's make it. And then they started making content and putting content out there. And that's a huge part of our campaign for the Tresemme. Reader, which is going really well. So very different way of doing it, but completely different to the model that you say. It's very much what's right for the job to be done versus a one size fits all.
- [14:37]
A
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B
Yeah, yeah. I think it's such a great way of framing the conversation because that's exactly what I mean about the job to be done. In some cases it could be that the buzz is a really good indicator of success. Now buzz is Buzz is what we would call a leading indicator. It's not a lagging indicator. It's not going to tell you, like, does it sell? You need to look at your sales and your return on investment as the true indicator of performance. But buzz can be a quick indicator of like this is getting organic conversation. Like people are wanting to share this, people are talking about this. And then you look at sentiment and they're doing it in a positive way, they're not just talking about it negatively. So things like the buzz you're getting, the organic conversation, things like the engagement, is it just superficial buzz or are they sharing, are they commenting, are they posting themselves? And then sentiment, it's positively positive. And then we look at other behaviors like search and I'm talking broad search. So AI engine optimization as well as the normal search engine optimization. So we look broadly at those as what we call the leading indicators of this is having traction. And you're right, there's some cases where a huge buzz. If the job to be done is like this brand has not got relevance and people do not find this, are not aware of this brand or they don't find this brand relevant to them in their lives. You know that old fashioned, you'd call that like upper funnel and mid funnel. That might be really great leading indicator for us. And we're like, right, we really, because we understand that this is a challenge around brand awareness or brand persuasion, we anticipate that this will travel through to sales. Then there could be a completely different job to be done where we're like, people love this brand, it's a high awareness of this brand, people think this brand's relevant, but somehow we're not closing the sale. And the old fashioned language, the lower funnel part of this is not closing, then you might take a different strategy where you're like, this is all about affiliates.
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A
Yeah.
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B
And affiliates are amazing group of creators where it's a completely different model. Like I say, not one size fits all. And then we might go for an affiliate model and you might be in a market like Indonesia, which has one of the highest penetration of affiliates in the world, especially on TikTok. And then you might do a different campaign and your metrics might be very much about how many affiliates are selling and what is the, I mean we call it gmv but what is the sales value per affiliate? What's that conversion? Which is very different indicator. So do you see how. Yes, we're very much focused on like what are we trying to do with this brand right now? What will convert into sales growth, into brand growth, into, into competitive growth. And then you work back what are the leading indicators of that? And it might be slightly different.
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A
That is a lot to manage. Even though there's technology partners, agency partners, creator partners and whatnot. But I would imagine speaking of like AI and things like this, there's some way to automate all of this. I know last year you had the opportunity to speak with my colleague Sam Bradley, our other senior marketing reporter who talked about the conveyor belt, the AI conveyor belt that you guys have, putting content out and things like that, and assets, paid assets. Talk to me a little about if there are plans to scale that to influencer, to automate some of those parts.
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B
Yeah, I think you've touched on a really good point. It's a lot to manage when there's lots of data points. And one thing that I think AI can Add huge value to us is create capacity for humans to assimilate so many data points that honestly, I think it gets to a point where even a human dedicating 247 couldn't do it. It's just a lot. Even if you were the absolute Excel wizard, it's a lot. Like you said, there's so much data now today. So one thing that I think AI has really helped us with and can continue to help us with is take that wealth of data, create some meaning out of it, and then allow the human to do what humans do best, which is add their judgment and make decisions and, you know, drive innovation through it and drive insight through it. So all of those different data points, I talk like, is it buzz as a leading indicator, is that buzz connected the sales? The AI can help you distill that into something that is manageable for you as a human. Then to add your uniquely human skills of judgment.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Of driving insight of creativity, which is obviously really important to these campaigns. So it's. I'm very much obsessed with this concept of it's not human does this machine does this. It's about the human superpowering the technology. So how can you use your special humanness to superpower the AI to then the AI add its superpower back to you so you elevate your performance as a marketeer?
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A
I want to put a pin in that because I like that idea. But before I forget my other question, I do want to also ask this idea of, well, the. Not to call it grunt work, but a lot of the manual hands on keyboard stuff can be automated. A computer, a machine handles that, and that frees up the people to do strategy. More bigger thinking. I've heard that talked about a lot in hypotheticals. Has your team been able to create either a system or something like that with that free time? Can you give me some examples of that?
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B
I'll give you some examples. And I think the word you use just ends perfect system. So everything I've learned and I'm very hands on in this, like I really use these tools myself because I think the best way to learn is by doing. And what I found is, you know, you can create an agent for anything. Like people talk about agentic. It's like, of course agents are possible, but they only create value at scale when you think of it in systemic terms and you think of systems. So I will now talk to you about some agents that we have created that absolutely do some of that manual work. These agents work best when it is a repetitive task. So That's a nice way of saying grunt work, but it's a repetitive task. The agents can work really well. But I want to be really clear that we're not looking to just build a bunch of agents. We're looking at building a system that really elevates that. In our system, it's very much about the human and the machine. It's a system that is a system or an ecosystem that leverages the power of both. But coming back to. Let me give you a specific example. So an agent that we've built that's been really helpful in this creative space is like betting. So there's a lot of content out there, There's a lot of creators out there. We need to understand who's right for our brand across many dimensions, whether they're reputational, all the way through to the quality of content, all the way through to how they work with competitors, their tone of voice. There's so many things. And what we've been able to do is we've created a tool called the brand dnai. Okay, clever.
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A
Thank you.
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B
And we have programmed that with kind of our brand values, our brand, our brand aesthetic, our brand tone of voice that then can connect with an agentic tool that is then the tool, the action. Because agentic is AI that takes action. The action the tool takes is it. It gives us feedback on this. This creator meets your criteria. This creator doesn't. But because it's connected to this intelligence around what the brand is, it can be really nuanced for Tresemme versus Dove versus Sunset. So you've got the. You've got the rules in there that might apply to all of Unilever, or you might have the rules in there that apply to best in class creator marketing. But then you've also got this brand affinity and advocacy, and that has really helped us narrow down to creators that then a marketeer can come and be like, oh, wow, I'd never found this person. And then they start to build relationships with them and meet them and have the great conversations that really unlock the cool ideas and the cool opportunities. If you'd had to do all that manually, the time for the relationship building and the innovation and the imagination would be narrowed. So we're trying to create the capacity for that side of it.
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A
How long did it take to put those guidelines together to have something that the AI can kind of operate within?
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B
That's the great thing about Unilever. We're strong believers in brand clarity, in who you are as a brand. So that's like a Discipline we've had in our business for a long time. Yeah, I mean, not for every brand. And obviously, like, you know, you're always looking at that to make sure that it's our ticket. It's not because you're changing it all the time, it's because you're looking to say, are we articulating it in the best way? And we learn a lot when you program that into an AI machine. How you program it in is really, is a really interesting concept. But yeah, it's not something that we had to build from scratch at all. We, we have, we used to call them brand books or brand keys. There's things in Unilever that are very, very smart and really, like I say, rooted in brand fundamentals.
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A
Does that become a living document to account for how quickly AI changes and how influencer or creator?
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B
So what's important when you build these systems that we're still building, not saying we're there yet, is that you build intelligence into it. Now that intelligence, when I say the word intelligence, it could be intelligence that's like, what does DUFF stand for? But it's also intelligence that's dynamic. So from that content you put out last week, what happened? And again, another reason why AI is amazing is it can take such dynamic information in and filter it into what's useful, what's not useful. So you're building, we call it like an intelligence layer that really can then feed the orchestration of the AI. And that's the kind of that intelligence layer, that orchestration layer of agents. That's what I mean by a system rather than just talking about, oh, here's a cool agent that I built, which is still cool. And as a human playing with it, I'm always amazed every day about how much amazing stuff AI can do to superpower my talent, superpower my team's talent. But it's the systems that's going to unlock the real value for our business
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A
with all that AI can do. I am curious, is there a point where you deem strictly human? A place where. So for some marketers that I talk to or media buyers, I'll let a lot of automation the planning happen. But like the actual buying of the media, I wouldn't do that myself. I want a belly to belly negotiation. Where does that stand for you?
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B
It's funny because the more, like I said, I'm very hands on with this because I believe that when you do something you get a depth of learning and insight. And I feel like the more I do it, the less likely I am to make any kind of definitive statement around this, because I'm like, I just don't think you can. Like anyone who says that they know an answer to something, I'm like, do you really? Because it's changing. And what I do fundamentally believe, though, and this isn't like a prediction, this is just something that I think is a human truth. It's what I said to you about we need to superpower the AI and the AI is here to superpower us. A framing around AI that really sticks with me is that people talk about AI as a tool. AI is an enabler, but at a really huge foundational level. And AI is the same as the printing press. AI is the same as electricity. Now, what did the printing press do beyond the actual technology of the printing press? I don't, by the way, I don't know much about the technology of the printing press, but it was huge
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A
when
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B
it was built and when it was scaled for humanity. One of the things that the printing press did is that's the reason that we all speak different languages and not just Latin. Because before the printing press, all scholars wrote everything in Latin. So language was not spread around the world. And the printing press allowed people to write something in their mother tongue, write something in their language and language. Like, how incredible that it became such a perfect. It's a technology that created a change in humanity and society and the economy. Electricity. Without electricity, power would always be tied to the geographic location the power was created. Whereas electricity means that you can create the power on one continent and pipe it to another continent. So again, these like, foundational technologies that allow such a platform for innovation. Internet was another one, and AI is another one. So coming back to your question, like, what's uniquely human, what's not? It would be like saying with electricity, like, what they were doing before, lighting candles, et cetera, like, should there always be a candle lighter? It kind of didn't become about that when the innovation took off. It actually created more jobs. And one of my favorite things about electricity, in terms of what it is, is it created the nightlife. Before electricity, you couldn't have nightlife. So think about how cool that is for humans. So for me, I'm very positive about AI and like, what we can do as humans to make it a platform for growth and a platform for the growth of humanity. And I think it all comes down to superpowering each other rather. So I don't necessarily. Like I said, I'm not going to sit here and say there's no hard goalposts yeah. One thing I think is, like, there's an integrity in a human natural.
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A
Yeah.
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B
Because AI is binary. Its own, of course, as far as creativity, Dove believes in something, so.
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A
Yeah.
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B
But that's what I mean about superpower. You could use AI to superpower your integrity because you could code that into a system to really make sure people stay to stick to those values. Do you see? It's not distinct distinct, but it's about thinking of it. In my head, I'm seeing this infinity loop connection rather than two columns. What do the humans do? What do the AIs do? I'm seeing it as it can become this really great infinity loop of connection. But I think the human has to be there. Without doubt.
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A
Absolutely. Listen, I could talk all day, clearly, but I can't thank you enough for spending some time with me this afternoon, walking us through what this looks like for you guys at Umber.
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B
Yeah, it was such a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you.
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A
Well, that brings us to the end of this episode of the Digiday Podcast. Thank you to everyone for listening. And please don't forget to share this episode with someone who you think would enjoy it. You can even rate us and leave us a comment on Apple Podcasts. We'll be back next week with another episode of the Digiday Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us.