In the spirit of Unilever CMO Weed

Unilever has the second-largest marketing budget in the world, spending 7.7 billion euros ($8.4 billion) on brand and marketing investments, according to its annual report 2016and it’s the job of chief marketing officer Keith Weed to make sure the company gets enough bang for its buck, persuading 2.5 billion people a day to use its products.

One of Weed’s biggest concerns is getting people to watch his ads online, for brands ranging from Ax in the US to Bushells Tea in Australia, in a world where people have many distractions. , and Weed is particularly concerned about how the advertising industry – and Unilever’s suppliers – decides whether something has actually been viewed or not.

Current Media Ratings Council standards suggest that someone able to see half a screen for two seconds would count as an online “view”. Weed is pushing for 100% of the pixels on a screen to be considered a view. “Can you imagine seeing half of a TV screen for two seconds and we would say it’s a TV commercial? I certainly wouldn’t consider it that,” he told CNBC. and to other reporters during a briefing early last week. of the Advertising Week Europe conference in London.

Unilever strategic purchasing

But arguably Weed’s concerns are broader than that. How does a company, which is currently undergoing strategic review following Kraft Heinz’ failed takeover bid in February, ensure it keeps pace with technology and does not follow the same path as Kodak, for example, which has experienced frequent restructuring after the market collapse of the traditional film market?

“In fast-moving markets, not everyone is moving at the same speed and that’s why, of course, you see companies giving up, the Kodaks [for example]. I was just reading that in 1998 they had 170,000 people and had 65% of the global film market. And three years later, the film market is gone. It’s extraordinary,” he told CNBC during a one-on-one briefing last week.

Unilever has bought companies such as Dollar Shave Club and skincare brands Dermalogica and Ren, in part to find new ways of doing business. Weed also runs the Unilever Foundry, its foray into start-ups, and chairs its digital ventures arm, which buys 5-15% of companies such as image technology company Olapic.

“These are companies that have cutting-edge approaches in different aspects of marketing and I haven’t bought 51% or 100% of the companies because we don’t want to take an ownership position, what we want to do is have our fingers on the pulse of what’s going on,” he told CNBC.

Will we soon see Unilever start selling other products direct to consumers, or by subscription, like with Dollar Shave Club? While these business models are “very interesting” because they provide the company with data on consumer buying habits, Weed says it’s too early to say when or if Unilever will start selling other brands. in this way. His strategy is to approach the companies he buys before applying what he learns.

“We learned from Ben & Jerry’s [the ice cream company it bought in 2000] and we’ve also moved into other areas, then surprise surprise you’ll see everything from sustainable vanilla in Wall’s vanilla ice cream as much as you see in Ben & Jerry’s. So [we] learn one way and then apply more broadly,” Weed said.

Digital experiences

Unilever has also provided its 5,500 marketers with digital training to ensure everyone is aware of trends, to ensure that a “lost generation” of marketers in their 30s and 40s can keep up with the pace of “digital native” consumers, who communicate via Whatsapp and Snapchat.

“It’s not a level playing field, in fact complexity and fragmentation offer huge opportunities for smart [business]…it’s those who are most willing to adapt who will survive,” Weed told CNBC.

The company is experimenting in particular with advertising by programming. He created ad thumbnails in Latin America for Ax and used automated technology to perform 150,000 permutations, presented to people based on what they were interested in and resulting in a campaign that was 115% more successful than the norm, says Weed.

But he cautions against using data to target people in creepy ways, such as when an ad appears to follow someone around the internet after they see a product online.

“If I can use data to give you something really useful, how and when you want it, then you say ‘that’s smart, how did they do that?’ and that’s the thing we try to focus on.”

sexism in advertising

The advertising industry should also expect an update on Unilever’s #Unstereotype initiative, which aims to tackle sexism in marketing, at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in June.

“Toe curling is still being advertised…and if we advertise shoddy as an industry, people will stop advertising.

“What I try to do is build our brands in the most engaging way. But what we’ve definitely learned is that if you can’t see it, you can’t be it. So if we’re just depicting women in the kitchen holding the wrapper as nothing more than a display for produce, rather than the full diverse characteristics of either gender, I think it’s a lot harder for people to see what they can be.”

Weed wouldn’t comment speculation that the company plans to sell Flora margarine as part of its strategic review.

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