The Infrastructure of Influence: Why Unilever is Moving Beyond the Media Buy

In this conversation, Selina Sykes of Unilever explains that working with 100,000 creators is not a marketing experiment, but a structural change to how the company operates. The message is clear: brands that treat creators as a simple media channel are already behind. By moving from buying reach to co-authoring culture, Unilever is building a system that treats creator relationships as intellectual property. This analysis helps leaders understand how to scale human-centric marketing while maintaining brand integrity. The advantage goes to those who use AI not to replace human judgment, but as an intelligence layer to manage complex, decentralized networks at a scale that was previously impossible.

The Hidden Cost of Lane-Keeping

Sykes argues that the traditional desire to keep agencies, technology partners, and creators in separate lanes is a major barrier to modern marketing. When teams work in silos, they lose the ability to capture the nuance of community-led insights. The system only works when these groups move from a vendor-client relationship to a collaborative ecosystem.

It used to be nice when you could keep people in their lanes. It is like, that is your lane do that. That is your lane do that. Now obviously everyone comes to that conversation with different expertise, which is great but it is hugely collaborative.

-- Selina Sykes

This shift is a strategic necessity. By bringing creators into the product development process, as seen in the Vaseline Originals campaign, the brand stops pushing a message and starts participating in an existing conversation. This leads to higher engagement and authentic advocacy, though it does require giving up total control over the narrative.

Why the Obvious Fix Makes Things Worse

Conventional marketing wisdom suggests that scaling creator programs requires a one-size-fits-all approach to metrics. Sykes disagrees, noting that the goal of the project must dictate the strategy. If a brand lacks relevance, buzz is a useful leading indicator. If the brand is already relevant but failing to convert, the strategy should shift to affiliate-led models where the metrics move from sentiment to GMV.

The system responds to your goals. If you optimize for the wrong metric, the system will deliver exactly that and nothing else. By failing to distinguish between upper-funnel awareness and lower-funnel conversion, teams often waste resources on high-reach campaigns that never turn into sales, or affiliate programs that lack the brand equity to sustain long-term growth.

The 18-Month Payoff: Building an Intelligence Layer

The biggest competitive advantage is the creation of an intelligence layer for brand DNA. Sykes describes building a system where AI agents are programmed with specific brand values, aesthetic guidelines, and tone-of-voice parameters.

These agents work best when it is a repetitive task. But I wanna be really clear that we are not looking to just build a bunch of agents. We are looking at building a system that really elevates that in our system, it is very much about the human and the machine.

-- Selina Sykes

This system allows for filtering creators at scale, ensuring the brand remains consistent even when working with thousands of partners. While this requires upfront investment in programming the AI with the brand identity, it creates a moat. Most competitors will continue to rely on manual, slow processes. By automating the work of vetting and alignment, Unilever frees its human talent to focus on high-level relationship building and strategy, where machines cannot compete.

Key Action Items

• Audit your Job to be Done: Before launching a creator campaign, categorize your goal as either awareness, persuasion, or conversion. Do not apply conversion metrics to awareness-building campaigns. (Immediate)
• Move from Media Buy to Co-Authorship: Identify creators who have already built organic content around your products. Reach out to them to formalize a partnership that rewards them for their original intellectual contribution. (Over the next quarter)
• Build a Brand DNA Intelligence Layer: Document your brand tone, values, and aesthetic into a structured format that can be used to train AI agents. This is your brand key for the automated era. (Next 3-6 months)
• Shift from Lanes to Ecosystems: Bring agencies, tech partners, and creators into the same planning room. The goal is to break the siloed communication that delays feedback loops. (Immediate)
• Invest in Dynamic Feedback Loops: Ensure your AI systems are not just executing tasks, but feeding performance data back into the intelligence layer to inform future creative decisions. (12-18 months)
• Prioritize Human Judgment in Integrity: Use AI to handle the scale, but retain human oversight for the final integrity check. The machine is the engine, but the human is the steering wheel. (Ongoing)