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Unilever’s chief growth and marketing officer Esi Eggleston Bracey has revealed that the company is integrating AI technology in its product shoots—and saving time and money in the process.
Today (March 18), the exec said at Nvidia’s GTC Summit that the CPG giant has been experimenting with NVIDIA Omniverse tech on brands including Dove, Vaseline, and TRESemmé.
The tech allows Unilever to produce “digital twins,” or digital replicas of its products. Each digital twin contains all of the product’s variants, labels, packaging, and language formats within a single file.
The tech also lets the company quickly insert AI-generated product images into messaging on TV and e-commerce, removing duplication to make the image production process twice as fast and half as expensive.
“We’ve transformed what was once a complex, slow process into a marketing system that frees up our teams to focus on what they do best—think bigger, be creative, push boundaries, and create magic for our brands,” Bracey said.
So far, Unilever has reduced content creation costs for TRESemmé Thailand by 87%, while generating content twice as fast and increasing purchase intent by 5%.
Beauty and wellbeing was the first of the company’s business groups to pilot the technology. Unilever said it has driven up to 55% savings and 65% faster turnaround on content, while doubling the click-through rate and holding attention three times longer.
Unilever said it is using more than 500 AI applications across the business, which is part of its Growth Action Plan 2030, designed to drive growth across its “superior brands” like Dove, Vaseline, Axe, and Hellmann’s.
Investing in influencers
Last month, Unilever abruptly shuffled its C-suite, announcing that chief executive officer (CEO) Hein Schumacher will leave on May 31 after less than two years in the role.
Unilever veteran and finance chief Fernando Fernandez is slated to fill the role following his departure.
“On behalf of the Board, I would like to thank Hein for resetting Unilever’s strategy, for the focus and discipline he has brought to the company and for the solid financial progress delivered during 2024,” chairman Ian Meakins said in a statement.
However, Meakins added that “there is much further to go to deliver best-in-class results.”
Fernandez, who has spent his entire career at Unilever since joining in 1987, plans to steer more of the company’s marketing budget toward influencer marketing.
The exec said he plans to spend 50% of the company’s media budget on social channels and will increase influencer marketing investment times 20.