Dive Brief:
- Unilever has appointed social-first agency Samy to develop and activate a global influencer strategy for its food business, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
- Samy will use its proprietary Maia platform to provide the CPG giant with access to more than 120 million influencers worldwide and related performance data, and will build systems around deployment and measurement.
- The appointment comes as Unilever has begun talks to sell its food business to McCormick & Co but has continued to make social media and influencer marketing a priority across its portfolio.
Dive Insight:
Unilever’s food business may be on the block, but it is continuing to move apace to meet the CPG giant’s larger marketing plans that include shifting half of media spend to social and working with 20 times as many influencers. The food business includes brands such as Frank’s RedHot, French’s, Hellmann’s and Knorr and has potential equity value of $33 billion, per a Bloomberg estimate.
“At Unilever, it’s about going where the consumers are and building Desire at Scale — growing our brands by embedding them authentically in culture. This means leaning strongly into creators who can help our stories travel further, feel more authentic and resonate more deeply,” Meg Bass, global media manager at Unilever Foods, said in a statement.
“Working with Samy will allow us to combine technology and data with deep knowledge of the whole social ecosystem, leading to more informed decisions around where and how we activate creator partnerships across markets. This will give our markets a clearer structure for working with creators, while still allowing them to respond to local behaviours, tastes and cultural context in a way that feels credible,” the executive added.
Samy will use a “glocal” team to deliver intelligence and insights that will help keep Unilever’s content culturally relevant in 13 markets: the U.S., U.K., Mexico, Brazil, Indonesia, the Philippines, Germany, France, Poland, Pakistan, Argentina, Canada and Turkey. The agency will focus not just on deployment but on measuring performance — a challenge that is coming into focus as influencer marketing spend increases.
“With teams working across continents, we’ll bring hyper-local intelligence into a shared global system, enabling Unilever to orchestrate influencer activity at scale while ensuring creator partnerships are shaped by the realities of each local market, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Sonsoles Piñeiro Kruik, chief growth officer at Samy, in a statement.
Since CEO Fernando Fernandez announced plans to move to a social-first advertising strategy, Unilever has activated many such activations across its portfolio. Dove, Unilever’s largest brand, continued its long-running influencer work with #ShareTheFirst, the brand’s first campaign made entirely from creator content without studios or added production. Personal care brands Vaseline and Axe have followed suit, while food brands including Hellmann’s and Knorr have tapped into social media to inform their efforts.
