Unilever taps AI to scale influencer content and go viral. With digital twins and GenAI, it’s creating assets at scale to fuel growth across social platforms.
Unilever is turbocharging its influencer marketing efforts to make products like Dove soap go viral on social media—and it’s using artificial intelligence to do it.
Chief Enterprise and Technology Officer Steve McCrystal said the company currently works with tens of thousands of influencers and aims to grow that number by 10 to 20 times over the next year. Influencer marketing is “a very powerful avenue for driving growth, and equally, we believe it’s also powerful for creating credibility.”
About half of consumers make purchases at least once a month because of influencer content, he said, citing research from social media software company Sprout Social. Influencers promote Unilever products like Vaseline and TRESemmé hair care, and more recently were integral in helping a cookie-scented line of Dove body-care products go viral, the company said.
In February, Unilever replaced its CEO to speed up a major turnaround plan. The company has faced analyst and investor pressure for years to reinvigorate growth and meet changing consumer trends. McCrystal said that generating more product demand, primarily through social media, is now a key priority for the tech team.
However, to equip its army of influencers, Unilever needs to create exponentially more “assets,” or visual components. That’s where AI comes in, he said.
“We’re now deploying thousands of assets a week across our brands, compared to single digits over months,” McCrystal said. Those visuals are passed on to influencers for their Instagram posts and TikTok.
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Earlier this year, Unilever started using Nvidia’s Omniverse platform to create digital twins of all its products. This method encapsulates a given product’s variants, labels, packaging, and language formats within a single file to generate product imagery faster and cheaper.
The digital twins are fed into Unilever’s AI content-generation platform, Gen AI Content Studios. This prompt-based system launched in 2023 can produce still images and copy.
Using the platform, Unilever can not only produce an exponentially larger number of personalized brand assets to give to influencers but also quickly repurpose influencer content for its own social posts, as was the case with a collaboration last year between Dove body care and the popular cookie brand Crumbl.
Dove back then released a limited-edition collection of soaps, scrubs and deodorants inspired by the trend of infusing bath products with food aromas. Unilever said 52% of the overall purchases came from people who hadn’t bought Dove before, and credited the more than 3.5 billion earned social impressions with the sales success.
AI was critical to getting those impressions, said Ryu Yokoi, chief media and marketing capability officer, Unilever North America. The company took over 100 discrete pieces of influencer content such as stills and short clips and used generative AI to remix them into different sizes, formats and lengths to tailor it to different audiences on different social-media platforms, he said.
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Unilever sees proven value in working with human influencers, but according to Yokoi, AI-generated influencers might one day play a role.
“AI is going to impact so many different aspects of this,” he said. “I think it depends on the brand and the use.”
