- Unilever has appointed social-first agency Samy to develop and activate a world influencer strategy for its food business, per details shared with Marketing Dive.
- Samy will use its proprietary Maia platform to offer the CPG giant with access to greater than 120 million influencers worldwide and related performance data, and can construct 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.
Unilever’s food business could also be on the block, nevertheless it is continuous to maneuver apace to satisfy the CPG giant’s larger marketing plans that include shifting half of digital media spend to social and dealing 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 constructing Desire at Scale — growing our brands by embedding them authentically in culture. This means leaning strongly into creators who may help our stories travel further, feel more authentic and resonate more deeply,” Meg Bass, global media manager at Unilever Foods, said in an announcement.
“Working with Samy will allow us to mix technology and data with deep knowledge of the entire social ecosystem, resulting in more informed decisions around where and the way we activate creator partnerships across markets. This will give our markets a clearer structure for working with creators, while still allowing them to reply to local behaviours, tastes and cultural context in a way that feels credible,” the manager added.
Samy will use a “glocal” team to deliver intelligence and insights that can 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 only on deployment but on measuring performance — a challenge that’s coming into focus as influencer marketing spend increases.
“With teams working across continents, we’ll bring hyper-local intelligence right into a shared global system, enabling Unilever to orchestrate influencer activity at scale while ensuring creator partnerships are shaped by the realities of every local market, slightly than a one-size-fits-all approach,” said Sonsoles Piñeiro Kruik, chief growth officer at Samy, in an announcement.
Since CEO Fernando Fernandez announced plans to maneuver to a social-first promoting 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 tell their efforts.
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