Frank Jobse – Unilever

In a world where data-driven decision-making is becoming the standard, Unilever is pushing forward with ambitious initiatives to transform its marketing strategies. In this insightful conversation with Frank Jobse, Digital Media and Commerce Measurement Lead for Nutrition at Unilever, he shares how the company is leveraging sophisticated data tools and navigating the challenges of balancing short-term sales with long-term brand growth. He further delves into Unilever’s journey towards becoming a data-driven powerhouse, the ongoing integration of AI and automation, and the complexities of maintaining a cohesive marketing vision across a global organisation.

Balancing Short-Term Gains with Long-Term Brand Building

In the world of fast-moving consumer goods, it’s tempting to focus on quick marketing wins instead of long-term brand building. At Unilever, consistency and long-term brand building are recognised as factors leading to long-term brand growth. The main KPIs for all the brands within Unilever are unaided brand awareness, favourability and efficiency (ROI). Recently, the company has also started looking more into the broader concept of mental availability and category entry points.

To have a high unaided awareness, the brand needs to be consistently visible to its audience. Frank is recognising that many campaigns are cut short before they fully realise their impact. “I think that consistency—keeping things consistent—is one of the core building blocks of media that are often missed.” This might happen due to many reasons relating to the culture and structure of Unilever, such as average tenancy times and the natural tendency of people to want to do new things.

However, Frank believes in a consistent, always-on media strategy, i.e. being on air more frequently with less high peaks. He also advocates for creative consistency, keeping the messaging clear and recognisable to build an emotional connection with consumers. “Only when keeping things consistent you can fully understand what’s working and what’s not,” he states. By extending campaign durations, Unilever could build stronger brands with sustained sales performance. The challenge is balancing short-term sales KPIs with the broader goal of building lasting brand equity.

“Keeping things consistent is one of the core building blocks of media that are often missed.”

Data-Driven transformation

Unilever is undergoing a significant transformation toward becoming a fully data-driven organisation. Frank’s team is working hard to drive this change, centralising data points so that they can be used in Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM), but also making relevant stakeholders convinced that there is value in it. “Before, MMM was executed very ad-hoc and only once every few years. Now, we have built a capability that is always on with monthly data refreshes and available to all marketers. This gives us a very solid understanding of campaign ROI performance.”

While this progress has been strong in the Netherlands, the challenge lies in centralising fragmented data sources and ensuring the capability is embraced company-wide. “We still focus too much on efficiency metrics instead of focusing on the impact it has on the brand,” Frank says. “Of course, you need to bring in revenue as well. Therefore, modelling the relationship between the effect of our media investments and our brand KPIs, and the brand KPIs to sales, can help us understand how a stronger or weaker brand impacts the baseline sales or our marketing activations.” He mentions the brand Calvé as an example of which you can see a positive correlation between brand growth and the effects of media activations.

In the future, Frank would want to enhance the MMM by understanding the dynamics between shopper- and brand marketing. Online Retail Media is a hot topic, but measuring the effect of different placements in grocery stores is sometimes left out in MMM.

‘’Marketing-Mix Modelling helps us understand how a stronger or weaker brand impacts the baseline sales or our marketing activations.”

Challenges of Scaling and Integrating AI and Technology

As Unilever continues its push towards greater automation and AI integration, the potential for advanced tools like generative AI in marketing is becoming more evident. However, scaling these technologies across a large organisation presents complexities. From managing various data sources to aligning different business groups, the road to full AI integration is not without its hurdles. “It’s quite a complex organisation. We’re not just in Nutrition; we’re in Beaty & Wellbeing, Personal Care, Home Care and Ice Cream. Each of these areas has distinct media needs and data streams, making it challenging to maintain a single overarching strategy. To implement AI effectively across these diverse business groups, a clear and unified vision is essential. Achieving this requires numerous workshops and alignment sessions to bring all stakeholders on board.

Nevertheless, Frank remains positive about using AI and machine learning to drive smarter media strategies. “We are using tools for performance optimisation, content enhancements and automation. Still, I think we’re at the very early stage of using AI. But I do believe that eventually with all new technologies like computer vision, object detection and Gen AI we will be able to learn much quicker, massively shorten the timespan of content creation and being able to adjust automatically based on data feeds. I also do think we will get hilarious commercials from Gen AI based on our prompts,” he concludes.

“I think we’re still at the very early stages [with using AI]. But I do believe that eventually, we’ll be able to use it more. And I think you’ll get some hilarious commercials out of it.”