Unilever isn’t tweaking its media plan. It’s ripping it up and writing a new one in permanent marker.

The company is pulling back from programmatic advertising and shifting half of its global media budget into creators and social-first channels. Half. That’s not an experiment.

That’s a manifesto.

On Next in Media, Mike Shields interviewed Selina Sykes, Unilever’s global transformation lead for beauty and well-being. Instead of hiding behind safe phrases about “innovation pipelines” or “balanced channel mixes,” she laid it out clearly: Unilever has “moved beyond personalization to this many-to-many model where you really need to harness communities, creators, consumers themselves to share and shape your brand.”

Pulling half of Unilever’s global media budget out of programmatic and flooding it into creators sounds visionary when it’s pitched on stage. But the operational reality is far less glamorous. Billions of dollars don’t automatically become 10,000 authentic influencer posts. They become contracts, compliance checks, late-night phone calls, and a CFO demanding to know why a 150-year-old brand is suddenly trending for the wrong reasons.

And it’s not just Unilever making this turn. The rest of the industry has been watching—and some are already sprinting down the same road. Zachary of Twin Galaxies described it as less of a choice and more of a reckoning. In his view, the shift to “creator-led” work isn’t a side strategy anymore; it’s the main event. Gen Z doesn’t see a line between social and media—to them, they’re the same thing. That’s why his company, built on branded competitions, is going all-in. The subtext was clear: if you’re not betting on creators, you’re betting against culture.

The real question is not whether this is a good idea but whether it can be operationalized in a way that is practical for major brands.

We’ve been here before. Starting around 2010, “creator-first” marketing made its first big entrance, only to fall in and out of fashion like the tide. The allure has always been obvious. More authenticity, more creativity, more trust. It’s the kind of language CMOs can take to the boardroom and the kind of narrative agencies can package up as a shiny new offering.

But as Judy Shapiro, Co-Founder of EngageSimply, points out, the problem has never been in the concept—it’s in the execution. “The seduction of creator-centric marketing is understandable,” she notes. “But these programs simply do not scale reliably or predictively.”

Creators are notorious for failing to deliver exactly what they promise. Sometimes they disappear, sometimes they go rogue, and often they just juggle so many commitments that deadlines slip and campaigns fracture. Brands that crave predictability—budgets, timelines, messaging control—often find themselves frustrated by the chaos of human behavior at scale.

Even more challenging is measurement. Traditional media gave marketers neat CPMs and GRPs to parade in PowerPoints. Creator-first campaigns, on the other hand, offer a messy patchwork of engagement rates, sentiment scores, and “authenticity signals” that rarely add up to a cohesive story. The math of trust, creativity, and credibility doesn’t slide neatly into a quarterly report.

The result, Judy argues, is that enthusiasm for creator-led marketing has risen and fallen as reliably as the seasons change. Each cycle begins with excitement about authenticity and community, but ends with brands walking away burned by unpredictability and a lack of accountability. “The concept makes sense,” she says. “The execution and measurement are the weak links in this approach.”

It’s a sobering counterpoint to the optimism flooding stages and press releases. For all the talk of creators as co-founders and brands as community builders, the Achilles’ heel of this movement is still scale, consistency, and control.

What Unilever is building looks less like a media plan and more like a factory for cultural production. Sykes described a content supply chain reinforced with AI studios in each market, designed to churn out localized, high-quality material at speed.

This isn’t about letting machines run wild—it’s about augmenting human creativity. Or as she framed it, the AI plus the human plus the humanity is what produces the results. The goal is to take a messy influencer ecosystem and turn it into something systematic: fast intake, careful vetting, localized production, and measurable outputs. The throughput metric isn’t impressions; it’s whether a brand’s content is shared, remixed, and talked about inside real communities.

Traditional brand safety was built on adjacency—avoid the wrong keywords, steer clear of the wrong videos. In a creator-first world, the risk is personal.

Sykes stressed that “just as much as our brands are authentic, the people we work with have to be authentic, relatable, trustworthy.” That means credibility and engagement quality now matter as much as reach. Community sentiment is the new measure of success. Authenticity has become the guardrail—and without it, all the money in the world can’t buy relevance.

The balancing act is brutal. Mega-influencers deliver reach, but micro and nano creators deliver stickiness. Unilever wants both: long-term, co-founder style partnerships with established names that lend legitimacy, and a long tail of smaller voices to keep the content flowing and the culture alive. The big names provide the halo effect, while the smaller ones supply the firepower.

At this scale, interns and Excel sheets are not enough. Unilever is leaning into technology that quietly holds the entire system together. AI-driven vetting tools help filter talent, creator marketplaces streamline discovery, and affiliate engines turn engagement into commerce. Affiliates in particular are becoming a flywheel—one creator’s success inspires others to replicate it, multiplying impact across networks.

Without this scaffolding, the entire strategy buckles under its own ambition. With it, chaos begins to resemble a system.

What Sykes revealed in public is just the surface. The real machinery—which agencies are pulling the strings, which marketplaces are filtering talent, which affiliate platforms are powering conversions—remains deliberately in the shadows.

Unilever is betting half a billion that this system can hold. But unless you know who’s actually keeping the machine upright, you’re watching the show without ever seeing the stagehands. And that’s the story we’ll take you into next—inside ADOTAT+.

Pulling half of Unilever’s global media budget out of programmatic and flooding it into creators sounds visionary when it’s pitched on stage.

But the operational reality is far less glamorous. Billions of dollars don’t automatically become 10,000 authentic influencer posts. They become contracts, compliance checks, late-night phone calls, and a CFO demanding to know why a 150-year-old brand is suddenly trending for the wrong reasons.

On Next in Media, Mike Shields pressed Selena Sykes, Unilever’s global transformation lead for beauty and well-being, on how the company plans to manage this chaos. She didn’t flinch. “Anything we do, we have to build a scaled advantage,” she said, before making the scaffolding explicit: “It’s about working with our partner agencies in markets, it’s about working with tech enablement to really find the way that we’re able to do that at scale.” Translation: without infrastructure, this pivot collapses under its own weight.

What Unilever is building looks less like a media plan and more like a factory for cultural production. Sykes described a “content supply chain” reinforced with AI studios in each market, designed to churn out localized, high-quality material at speed. This isn’t about letting machines run wild—it’s about augmenting human creativity. As she explained, “The AI plus the human plus the humanity is what gets the great results.”

The goal is to turn a messy influencer ecosystem into something systematic: fast intake, careful vetting, localized production, and measurable outputs. The throughput metric isn’t impressions; it’s whether a brand’s content is shared, remixed, and talked about inside real communities.

Traditional brand safety was built on adjacency—avoid the wrong keywords, steer clear of the wrong videos. In a creator-first world, the risk is personal. As Sykes put it, “It’s really important for us that just as much as our brands are authentic, the people we work with are authentic, relatable, trustworthy.”

In practice, that means measuring audience credibility, engagement quality, and community sentiment with the same rigor once applied to Nielsen points. Authenticity has become the guardrail. Without it, all the money in the world can’t buy relevance.

The balancing act is brutal. Mega-influencers deliver reach, but micro and nano creators deliver stickiness. Sykes made it clear Unilever needs both: “There are different types of creators… the more co-founder type relationship where you’re collaborating long-term, and others are smaller voices who fuel your model with content volume.”

The strategy is to use co-founder-level creators to give brands legitimacy and narrative depth, while long-tail creators provide cultural penetration and relentless content flow. One supplies the halo; the other supplies the firepower.

At this scale, interns and Excel sheets are not enough. Unilever is leaning on AI-driven vetting tools, creator marketplaces, and affiliate engines to manage discovery, compliance, and commerce. Affiliates, in particular, are becoming a flywheel. As Sykes explained, creators whose content converts inspire others to replicate success, multiplying impact across networks.

The underlying principle is clear: without technology, this strategy buckles. With it, Unilever can attempt the impossible—turn chaos into a repeatable system.

What Sykes revealed in public is just the surface. The real machinery—which agencies are pulling the strings, which marketplaces are filtering the talent, which affiliate platforms are powering the conversions—remains deliberately in the shadows.

Unilever is betting half a billion that this system can hold. But unless you know who’s actually keeping the machine upright, you’re watching the show without seeing the stagehands. And that’s the story we’ll take you into next—inside ADOTAT+.

Unilever’s Vaseline stunt isn’t just a marketing sideshow — it’s a roadmap for how the next decade of advertising will be run. And unless you’re inside ADOTAT+, you’re watching from the cheap seats.

👉 If you’re not inside ADOTAT+, you’re not just missing analysis. You’re missing the survival guide for the future of marketing. When Unilever rewrites the playbook, the ripple hits every agency, brand, and platform.

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