A year after declaring creators core to its marketing plan, Unilever has grown its creator program from 10,000 to 300,000 — and its executives are now deciding which parts of influencer marketing to hand to automated systems. “In most of the places where we are using technology, technology is used for us to augment the human choices,” said Leandro Barreto, chief marketing officer for Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing business group, speaking at a Cannes Lions roundtable. “This doesn’t need to be done by a person in an Excel. This can be done by a system that scans the internet.”
The automation so far covers the administrative layer. One unnamed tool scans social video to find people already posting positive stories about Unilever products across the 190 countries where they’re sold — candidates for future creator work. AI agents can assemble brand-safe, brand-specific creator lists in minutes and surface any past controversies, work that once meant slogging through Google or the platforms natively.
The scale problem is industry-wide. U.S. influencer marketing spend is expected to grow 15.7% this year, reaching $13.7 billion by 2027, per eMarketer. Campaigns that included five to eight creators a few years ago now ask for 25 to 30, said Jennifer Quigley-Jones, vp of strategy and partnerships at PMG — with agents absorbing brand safety checks, data collection, briefings, and document standardization along the way.
Quigley-Jones also named the trade-off: “That level of automation for content, it works, but it often will drive content to being unimaginative.” Strict briefs plus automated approvals incentivize creators to play it safe — anything inventive risks getting flagged, delayed, or reshot.
Barreto isn’t claiming the machines are ready for more. “At some point, we are going to have more data and more intelligence, and we’re going to have more trust that is the right thing, but I don’t think we are there yet,” he said. For the 300,000 humans on the roster, the company’s answer is less automation than architecture. “We’re not going to bring them all into a meeting — we’d have hundreds of thousands of people,” said Selina Sykes, global vp of digital, social and AI transformation at the beauty and wellbeing group. “But we’re building communities.”
Read more at Digiday.