Unilever: Data and programmatic driving effectiveness, but we need more staff

Industry Contributor 28 Jul 2019 - 2 min read

Unilever: Data and programmatic driving effectiveness, but we need more staff

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Tags: unilever, marketing, programmatic, data, digital, advertising, alan jope

Unilever boss Alan Jope says taking a more data-driven and programmatic approach to marketing has significantly increased effectiveness and RoI. But the FMCG giant needs to hire more people to run more complex campaigns (Marketing Week).

Key points

Jope says Unilever’s 24 digital hubs are now responsible for 600 data-driven campaigns
Approach has enabled 30 basis point reduction in marketing and brand spend
Digital teams finding segments that it can apply across divisions, such as ‘vegans’ or ‘fashionistas’, improving efficiency
But finding people to run complex campaigns challenging and adding cost
“The bottleneck on great work is having warm bodies to run digital campaigns, rather than absolute digital spend” – Jope

Unilever’s top line growth in mature markets is sluggish and CMO turned CEO Alan Jope is reforming its approach to marketing in a bid to both improve margin and drive growth. No mean feat, but if the returns outweigh increased resource costs, job done.

That’s a double-edged sword for agencies: Unilever is reducing agency spend and also looking to hire digital and data-savvy staff. And if it is struggling to hire enough staff, it may need to pay more. If other big marketing organisations take the same path the upshot is higher costs for agencies, against diminishing income.