{"id":3819,"date":"2026-07-30T12:36:42","date_gmt":"2026-07-30T12:36:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/justfineinfotech.com\/inside-unilevers-300000-creator-network-the-logistics-behind-the-headline-number\/"},"modified":"2026-07-30T12:36:43","modified_gmt":"2026-07-30T12:36:43","slug":"inside-unilevers-300000-creator-network-the-logistics-behind-the-headline-number","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/justfineinfotech.com\/fr\/inside-unilevers-300000-creator-network-the-logistics-behind-the-headline-number\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside Unilever\u2019s 300,000 creator network: the logistics behind the headline number"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Creator Economy
\nInside Unilever\u2019s 300,000 creator network<\/a>: the logistics behind the headline number
\n\u00a0\u2022\u00a0 July 30, 2026 \u00a0\u2022
\nIvy Liu<\/p>\n

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\u2019s FIFA World Cup. What\u2019s less well understood is everything underneath that headline number \u2014the 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.<\/p>\n

With CEO Fernando Fern\u00e1ndez recently crediting creators for the company\u2019s growth on an earnings call<\/a>, now\u2019s 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\u2019s creator push, breaking down the logistics of it and interrogating its limitations.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

To its credit, Unilever has been clear that the scale is necessary \u2014 that it isn\u2019t working with 300,000 creators for headlines. It\u2019s doing so because its CEO is betting that creators are vital to competing against the world\u2019s largest brands<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve had to step up because we\u2019re facing the Coke\u2019s of the world, the Adidas of the World, the Budweiser\u2019s 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,\u201d said Rani Al Hajji, chief growth and transformation officer for Unilever Personal Care.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The World Cup served as a stress test for that thesis. It was the first major event since Unilever\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unilever\u2019s 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<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat Unilever has done with the World Cup is put a stake in the ground for what the new normal of influencer marketing should be,\u201d Jennifer Quigley-Jones, vp of strategy and partnerships at PMG, previously told Digiday<\/p>\n

For companies of Unilever\u2019s size, that new normal really comes down to this: thinking about the logistics of creators, not just the marketing of them<\/p>\n

Unilever told Digiday that its massive creator program is managed through a combination of in-house teams, agency partnerships, and experiential programs, but didn\u2019t provide details beyond that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe management model varied depending on the campaign, creator and market, allowing teams to scale effectively across a large and diverse creator network,\u201d Yokoi said<\/p>\n

That management model, though, has been years in the making. It didn\u2019t emerge in the wake of Fern\u00e1ndez\u2019s now-public pledge to rewrite the company\u2019s marketing around creators<\/p>\n

Yokoi said the team didn\u2019t build a creator network from scratch, but leveraged its \u201cyears of investment in creator-first marketing\u201d and scaled its paid and earned creator efforts, building \u201cmajor nano creator campaigns\u201d 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 \u201csees sport not simply as sponsorship, but as a platform to build brand desire, cultural relevance and long-term growth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whether Unilever needs hundreds of thousands of creators to make that happen is debatable<\/p>\n

\u201cThat [number] is like\u2026 \u2018We want to kill our competitors. Don\u2019t even try\u2026How do we eliminate anyone else from working with creators from a strategy standpoint?,\u2019\u201d said Oli<\/p>\n

Like Ormos, plenty of marketers are skeptical that any company \u2014 let alone Unilever \u2014 could actually work with that many creators at once, wondering instead whether it\u2019s less an active roster than a pool to draw on as needed. Pressed for clarification, Unilever told Digiday it has an \u201cactive global network of approximately 300,000 creators.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019t 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know if that\u2019s what Unilever is doing\u2026but I do think the real question is what\u2019s 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?\u201d asked Brad Hoos, CEO of influencer marketing agency The Outloud Group.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cScale 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,\u201d he said. \u201cThink 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which is where automation comes in. The agency execs Digiday spoke with all believe it is a major advancement in terms of the \u201cplumbing\u201d of influencer work and maximizing efficiency, but noted there are some serious potential downsides<\/p>\n

Using AI to e, suggested Ormos. \u201cEveryone\u2019s finding that you\u2019re doing the same search on some SaaS-type thing you built that\u2019s scraping creators, you\u2019re searching for the same audience or the same engagement rate, you\u2019re just gonna be hitting up the same creators,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The risks don\u2019t just lie in the creators you find, but the ones you don\u2019t. As the creator economy grows and scales and more and more people join its workforce, there\u2019s myriad ways to discover great brand partners, many of which don\u2019t employ AI scraping.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cCreative thinking is at the forefront of this industry, some of the best creators that we work with today probably wouldn\u2019t have been in a ranking list on someone\u2019s spreadsheet six months ago,\u201d Ormos said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Now Agency\u2019s Feldman noted that, while automation can accelerate execution, it shouldn\u2019t eliminate room for creativity.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThe best creator partnerships often happen because someone takes a chance in recommending someone. A creator and their manager pitches something that\u2019s unexpected. A trend pops up overnight. A relationship develops over a number of years,\u201d he said. \u201cNone of those moments that I just named, none of them emerge from rigid workflows.\u201d<\/p>\n

Suffice it to say, a creator selection process at this scale could produce some redundancies \u2014 and that\u2019s 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\u2019s no single centralized process.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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\u2019s Hoos warned: \u201cIt could be a race to the mean here in terms of the creative content they would want,\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s the tone brands set with influencer campaigns at this scale<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we talk about creators, it\u2019s not all the same,\u201d said Leandro Barreto, chief marketing officer for Unilever\u2019s beauty and wellbeing business group. Barreto spoke during a Unilever roundtable hosted at this year\u2019s Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. He added, \u201cIt\u2019s very different to work with a creator with 300 million followers and work with the other 150,000 with 1,000 followers.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Source: digiday.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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