Dive Brief:

• Unilever’s top marketer claims artificial intelligence (AI) is allowing the packaged goods giant to produce some of its content twice as fast and at half the cost, per a press release. 
• Chief Growth and Marketing Officer Esi Eggleston Bracey said technology like Nvidia’s Omniverse platform is helping the Dove owner to create convincing “digital twins” of its products, accelerating the output of product imagery and its adaptability across formats. The company has also embraced Nvidia’s Open Universal Scene Description 3D framework. 
• Such efficiency-minded efforts are touching channels from TV advertising to e-commerce and are part of Unilever’s Growth Action Plan (GAP) 2030 strategy focused on boosting performance. Unilever is vying to step up growth after ousting CEO Hein Schumacher late last month. 

Dive Insight:

While AI-generated commercials still fail to cross the uncanny valley for many consumers, Unilever is seeing success leveraging the technology for a specific use that could be relevant to other packaged goods marketers. The CPG is tapping into 3D modeling tools like Nvidia’s Omniverse development platform to spin up digital twins of its products, cutting down on costs and time spent while preserving a sense of brand identity. Unilever’s Bracey spoke about the organization’s AI initiatives at Nvidia’s GTC developer conference earlier this week.  

Digital twins, a form of physically accurate 3D replicas, contain a number of assets related to a product, including different variants, packaging and language labels, in a single file, serving as a “single digital truth,” as Unilever terms it. This allows product imagery to be pumped out faster and slashes duplicative efforts adapting content across marketing channels. By removing the busywork, Unilever hopes to enable its marketing teams to pursue more ambitious brand-building projects.

“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,” said Bracey in a statement. “This isn't about pushing out more content — anyone can do that. It’s about starting with a deep understanding of people’s needs and desires, executing our campaigns with creativity and backed by a high-quality content creation machine to deliver desire at scale.”

Unilever’s beauty and well-being segment was the first to test out the AI tech, with promising early results. The group that includes Tresemmé, Dove, Vaseline and Clear saw 55% growth in savings and turned around content 65% faster, while some brands even recorded an increase in purchase intent from consumers.

Unilever has taken a more cautious approach to AI in other areas. Dove last year pledged to never use AI models in place of real women in its advertising as part of a long-running “Real Beauty” platform. An accompanying campaign illustrated how automation technology could lead to even more unrealistic beauty standards for women and shared inclusive prompting guidelines for generative AI software.

Unilever’s broader marketing mandates are starting to change under new leadership in ways that could dovetail with its proliferating AI applications, which now number in the hundreds. Fernando Fernandez, who replaced Schumacher as CEO in February, recently told a Barclays analyst that the company is aiming to allocate half of its marketing budget to social media while vastly expanding its work with influencers, The Drum reported. 

Fernandez is tasked with speeding up a turnaround plan that was sluggish to take hold under his predecessor. Proctor & Gamble, a top rival, recently overtook Unilever on the performance front, The Wall Street Journal reported.