New Unilever boss shifts marketing spend from ads to influencers

Unilever’s new CEO Fernando Fernandez is planning to radically boost investment in influencer marketing against traditional advertising.

In an interview with The Times, he said his customers are now suspicious of advertising created by brands and this means investment there will be scaled back with the budget for influencers rising by multiple of 20.

“Messages from brands coming from corporations are suspicious messages,” Fernandez said in his first newspaper interview since taking the helm of the multinational corporation that includes beauty, personal care, household essentials and food and drink in its giant portfolio.

He added: “Creating marketing activity systems in which others can speak for your brand at scale is very important. Influencers, celebrities, TikTokers. These are the voices that matter.”

Fernandez believes this social-first” ad strategy is “probably the biggest change in our company going forward”. And he said the need for an army of influencers will require “a machine of content creation very different from the one we have had in the past”.

The newspaper also quoted a discussion he’d had with a Barclays analyst saying: “There are 19,000 zip codes in India, there are 5,764 municipalities in Brazil. I want one influencer in each of them. In some of them, I want 100.”

Unilever has access metrics that give it “a very clear understanding of what the return on all these kinds of things is”.

Taking a cleaning brand, Cif, as an example, a 2023 TikTok stream with the #CleanTok hashtag saw 100 billion+ views. And social media videos were watched over 300 million times with a 38% rise in 18 to 28-year-olds in the UK buying a brand that had mainly been bought by older consumers before the campaign.

Fernandez said the returns from such campaigns are much higher now than they were in the past.

He didn’t say how much the company would be spending exactly on influencer campaigns but the newspaper did say that globally, advertisers spent about $500 million on influencers in 2015 (source: Statista), rising to $6.5 billion by 2019 and $35 billion last year.