Inside the infrastructure behind Unilever’s creator force

**Kamika McCoy** (0:06)
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Hello, hello, and welcome to another episode of The Digiday Podcast. I'm your co-host, Kamika McCoy, Senior Marketing Reporter here at Digiday, recording to you live from Cannes. I think it's fair to say at this point that the creator presence at Cannes Lion, at least from my perspective, at the Cannes Lion Festival of Creativity, is hard to miss. There's so many of them, and they're not just perched on panels anymore. They're walking amongst us along the Croisette, and they're here in Troves, both big and more niche, to meet with brands and to strike deals, which is a really nice backdrop for our conversation, which I've got a guest today, Selina Sykes, a Global VP of Digital, Social, and AI Transformation for Unilever's Beauty and Wellbeing. Hi, Selina, how are you?

**Selina Sykes** (1:25)
Yeah, I'm great. Thanks for having me.

**Kamika McCoy** (1:27)
I'm so excited to talk to you because, like I said, the creators have a really, really big presence this year, and you guys as CEO earlier this year, really put the industry on notice with this big plans to scale from 10,000 creators to, 100,000 creators across the company. But from your point of view, why make that investment now? What were the signals there as opposed to three, four, and five years ago?

**Selina Sykes** (1:53)
I think firstly, we have been moving to this space for some time. So we've seen for a long time that where people's attention, where relevance is built, where there's conversation, where communities are forming has been shifting for some time, as we've all seen with the rise of social media platforms into these spaces. And through that, we've seen this incredible growth of the communities creating their own content. If you look at the beauty content that's available, say, on something like YouTube, 86 percent of it is coming from creators, which means only 14 percent of it is coming from brands. And we've seen that for a long time. So this hasn't been a massive pivot. It's been something that we've been growing as the attention and the conversations have been moving into these social spaces. As the creator economy has been growing, we've been building this capability. So for a long time, especially in my area of beauty and well-being, we've been investing in building our understanding of this space, learning and starting to build our brands in this space. And I think what our CEO was talking about as he went out there is like, now we've reached a point where this is really not a channel.
We can't look at influences as a media channel or a transaction. This is about a new marketing model. And something like I and my CMO is really passionate about is, actually, if you really think about it, the what of marketing, the fundamentals, you want to reach people, you want to get them to think that the brand is relevant to them and their lives and their needs, and then you want them to buy the brands. That is always going to be true, like always. That's the job to be done as a marketeer, and it could happen in a single moment on TikTok Shop, or it could happen in a more slow way as it did in the days gone by.
But we really believe that if we stick with those fundamentals, but see what's changing, like the how is moving and changing at incredible pace. We've never seen anything like it. That's where we're trying to really move fast and build capabilities and that's where that statement came from, in terms of the what is still really fundamental to us. But we appreciate that the how is changing, we're moving with that, and we're making the right choices to make sure that our brands keep growing in those spaces.

**Kamika McCoy** (4:16)
Absolutely. Now, Unilever, obviously, massive company with lots of different brands and portfolios.
With your specific, I want to call it a B because I'm a reporter, vertical.

**Selina Sykes** (4:27)
Yeah, vertical.

**Kamika McCoy** (4:29)
Beauty and Wellbeing, I imagine the CEO spoke broadly, but for your vertical, right? What is the approach to creators then look like? Is it also half of the spend and 300,000 creators, or what does that look like specifically for you guys?