Inside Unilever’s AI beauty marketing assembly line — and its implications for agencies

Unilever’s been building a generative AI assembly line for its digital creative. The system might offer a model for heavyweight brand peers, but could also cause a headache for creative agencies.

For the last year the CPG giant has been working with marketing services firm The Brandtech Group to build up its Beauty AI Studio: a bespoke, in-house system inside its beauty and wellbeing business. Now in place across 18 different markets (the U.S. and U.K. among them), the studio is being used to make assets for paid social, programmatic display inventory and e-commerce usage across brands including Dove Intensive Repair, TRESemme Lamellar Shine and Vaseline Gluta Hya.

“It’s a different way of working. We used to send briefs off and get content back. Now it’s this agile, iterative approach,” Selina Sykes, global vp and head of marketing transformation, beauty and wellbeing, told Digiday. Sykes estimated that on average, Unilever was using the system to create 400 creative assets per product: “Before, we’d be doing 20 assets per campaign, and now we’re doing hundreds.”

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