Creative diversity and production efficiency for Unilever's global brands.

Over the past decade, the CPG/FMCG industry has been disrupted in many ways, including the shift to digital and eCommerce, the rise of small brands, and the growth of private label. Amongst other things, this has driven a need to engage directly with consumers, adapt the approach to product innovation and marketing, and an increased need for agility.

To meet these challenges, Unilever’s communications process requires a new approach for digital content production, to find new cost-efficient, diverse, environmentally-friendly production solutions to create relevant content, at speed and scale, across all markets.

Since 2016, Unilever teams have completed almost 200 briefs and produced thousands of pieces of original digital, social and TVC content using Genero’s global network and content production platform. Unilever has been able to reduce costs, rapidly shorten time to market, increase diversity, and reduce carbon emissions by working with local creatives, on the ground, for any market.

The efficiency and versatility of Genero has allowed over 30 Unilever brands, including Ben & Jerry’s, Dove, LUX, Persil and Pond’s, to generate content for markets across the Americas, EMEA, Asia and Australia.

From traditional TVC’s to new social AR filters, Unilever marketers have created integrated campaigns, TV commercials, brand films, product demonstrations, animations, voice overs, internal videos, explainer videos and thumb-stopping social content, with huge time and cost savings.

As part of our Masters of Disruption series, we spoke to Assem Puri, CMO at Unilever International & CEO at Unilever Korea & Singapore.

Aseem leads marketing, innovation and digital communications for Unilever International, responsible for managing brand building for a billion dollar portfolio, as well as launching and building brands globally across new geographies, channels and customers. Concurrently he heads up Unilever’s business in Korea, aiming to lead the team to become the fastest growing business for Unilever.

In this episode, Aseem discusses Unilever’s response to the immense growth of e-commerce, small brands, private labels and consumer tech during the pandemic, and how a combination of flexible, regional content hubs and creative tech help their brands to produce fast, effective content on a global scale.