Inside Unilever’s 300,000 creator network: the logistics behind the headline number

The Creator Economy
Inside Unilever’s 300,000 creator network: the logistics behind the headline number
 •  July 30, 2026  •
Ivy Liu

Last year, the conglomerate announced plans to center creators in its marketing, and has since built an army of 300,000 of them, activating 50,000 at this year’s FIFA World Cup. What’s less well understood is everything underneath that headline number —the logistics of running a network that size, the AI infrastructure propping it up, and the risks of automating something as human as the creator economy.

With CEO Fernando Fernández recently crediting creators for the company’s growth on an earnings call, now’s as good a time as any to dig into the practicalities of running a network this size. Digiday spoke with Unilever as well as several agency execs to demystify the company’s creator push, breaking down the logistics of it and interrogating its limitations.  

To its credit, Unilever has been clear that the scale is necessary — that it isn’t working with 300,000 creators for headlines. It’s doing so because its CEO is betting that creators are vital to competing against the world’s largest brands

“We’ve had to step up because we’re facing the Coke’s of the world, the Adidas of the World, the Budweiser’s of the world, who are extremely good and have a history of doing those things for a longer time than we have. So we have to step up significantly,” said Rani Al Hajji, chief growth and transformation officer for Unilever Personal Care. 

The World Cup served as a stress test for that thesis. It was the first major event since Unilever’s massive creator pivot, and included partnerships, immersive experiences, match attendance and mobile activations. Chief media and marketing capability officer Ryu Yokoi said it reinforced the notion that global scale and local relevance drives the strongest impact. 

Unilever’s Q2 earnings call gave a bit more detail, with the company stating that its 50,000 World Cup creators had a combined audience of more than 600 million people

“What Unilever has done with the World Cup is put a stake in the ground for what the new normal of influencer marketing should be,” Jennifer Quigley-Jones, vp of strategy and partnerships at PMG, previously told Digiday

For companies of Unilever’s size, that new normal really comes down to this: thinking about the logistics of creators, not just the marketing of them

Unilever told Digiday that its massive creator program is managed through a combination of in-house teams, agency partnerships, and experiential programs, but didn’t provide details beyond that. 

“The management model varied depending on the campaign, creator and market, allowing teams to scale effectively across a large and diverse creator network,” Yokoi said

That management model, though, has been years in the making. It didn’t emerge in the wake of Fernández’s now-public pledge to rewrite the company’s marketing around creators

Yokoi said the team didn’t build a creator network from scratch, but leveraged its “years of investment in creator-first marketing” and scaled its paid and earned creator efforts, building “major nano creator campaigns” to reach communities at scale. Yokoi said these multi-tiered activations proved big cultural moments require an always-on, social first approach that can keep the conversation going beyond match day, one that “sees sport not simply as sponsorship, but as a platform to build brand desire, cultural relevance and long-term growth.”

Whether Unilever needs hundreds of thousands of creators to make that happen is debatable

“That [number] is like… ‘We want to kill our competitors. Don’t even try…How do we eliminate anyone else from working with creators from a strategy standpoint?,’” said Oli

Like Ormos, plenty of marketers are skeptical that any company — let alone Unilever — could actually work with that many creators at once, wondering instead whether it’s less an active roster than a pool to draw on as needed. Pressed for clarification, Unilever told Digiday it has an “active global network of approximately 300,000 creators.”

It’s not so much clarification as it is a restatement. Then again, maybe the number itself is the wrong thing to fixate on. Unilever has dozens of brands operating in dozens of countries, which means 300,000 isn’t necessarily one network so much as it is lots of smaller ones, with each brand potentially working with a different set of creators in each market. Unilever admits it can’t bring all 300,000 creators into a single meeting. Instead, high-profile creators are tapped for long-term collaborations while smaller creators are for scale or to amplify cultural moments. 

“I don’t know if that’s what Unilever is doing…but I do think the real question is what’s the objective for each one of your brands, and how effective are these 300,000 influencers in total in allowing you to achieve those objectives?” asked Brad Hoos, CEO of influencer marketing agency The Outloud Group. 

Gabe Feldman, co-founder and managing partner of The Now Agency, said this kind of scale requires immense operational lift and major adjustments to achieve it. 

“Scale sounds great in theory, but then when you go a layer deeper, you also have to think about the operational impact that influencer scale has on a large business,” he said. “Think about the operational layers that you have to peel back from vetting to contracting to briefing to creative review, for a lot of organizations, if they try to scale to even 1000s of creators, let alone hundreds of 1000s of creators, it could really impact their internal operating model.”

Which is where automation comes in. The agency execs Digiday spoke with all believe it is a major advancement in terms of the “plumbing” of influencer work and maximizing efficiency, but noted there are some serious potential downsides

Using AI to e, suggested Ormos. “Everyone’s finding that you’re doing the same search on some SaaS-type thing you built that’s scraping creators, you’re searching for the same audience or the same engagement rate, you’re just gonna be hitting up the same creators,” she said. 

The risks don’t just lie in the creators you find, but the ones you don’t. As the creator economy grows and scales and more and more people join its workforce, there’s myriad ways to discover great brand partners, many of which don’t employ AI scraping. 

“Creative thinking is at the forefront of this industry, some of the best creators that we work with today probably wouldn’t have been in a ranking list on someone’s spreadsheet six months ago,” Ormos said. 

The Now Agency’s Feldman noted that, while automation can accelerate execution, it shouldn’t eliminate room for creativity. 

“The best creator partnerships often happen because someone takes a chance in recommending someone. A creator and their manager pitches something that’s unexpected. A trend pops up overnight. A relationship develops over a number of years,” he said. “None of those moments that I just named, none of them emerge from rigid workflows.”

Suffice it to say, a creator selection process at this scale could produce some redundancies — and that’s before factoring in the content itself. Does it suffer at such a high quantity? Does it start to feel too formulaic? Unilever said its content approval process varies, based on the creator management model since there’s no single centralized process. 

As tricky as that can be, it may also have its benefits. After all, aligning with brand guidelines and campaign objectives at such a scale could still result in homogeneity. As The Outloud Group’s Hoos warned: “It could be a race to the mean here in terms of the creative content they would want,” 

That’s why creative strategy matters so much. Working out creative prompts and strategy ahead of a campaign launch can help keep things from going stale. And then there’s the tone brands set with influencer campaigns at this scale

“When we talk about creators, it’s not all the same,” said Leandro Barreto, chief marketing officer for Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing business group. Barreto spoke during a Unilever roundtable hosted at this year’s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. He added, “It’s very different to work with a creator with 300 million followers and work with the other 150,000 with 1,000 followers.” 

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Source: digiday.com