Inside the infrastructure behind Unilever’s creator force

Unilever is transforming its marketing model by treating creators as a new mode of engagement rather than a media channel, with plans to spend half its media budget on social channels and increase influencer investment. Selina Sykes, global VP of digital, social and AI transformation at Unilever, detailed the company's creator infrastructure, including initiatives like Vaseline's "Vaseline Originals" that reward creators with 15% of product sales, and the use of AI to analyze data while preserving human judgment for creativity and decision-making.

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-digiday-podcast/id962605432 • Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/21TOeNMf1BLdSlQEdJ2rYY Creators are no longer a media channel or transaction. It’s an entirely new marketing mode — at least that’s what the infrastructure behind Unilever’s creator strategy indicates. Call it a transformation. Back in 2025, Unilever put the industry on notice https://digiday.com/marketing/a-year-after-unilever-the-ad-funded-creator-economy-is-still-catching-up-to-its-own-ambition/ after announcing its plans to spend half of its media budget on social channels and increase its investment in influencer marketing. “We can’t look at influencers as a media channel or a transaction. This is about a new marketing model,” said Selina Sykes, global vp of digital, social and AI transformation of beauty and wellbeing at Unilever. Sykes spoke on a recent episode of the Digiday Podcast recorded during the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity 2026. The Unilever exec peeled back the curtain on the beauty and wellbeing vertical’s influencer infrastructure. This interview has been lightly edited for clarity. Getting creators paid That Vaseline’s “Vaseline Verified” campaign very much started from the community, and we leveraged it. This year, we brought the next stage of that evolution, which is called “Vaseline Originals,” where we went back to who were the creators that first came up with some of these Vaseline hacks — these hacks that households across the world world use, who were the some of the very first creators that talked about these online went back to 2008 — finding those creators, collaborating with those creators, building products with those creators of those hacks into their products, and then building such a deep collaboration with them, that they’re going to be rewarded through percentage of sales — 15% of the sales of those products will go to those creators. Measurement In some cases, it could be that the buzz is a really good indicator of success. Buzz is what we would call a leading indicator. It’s not a lagging indicator. It’s not going to tell you: does it sell? You need to look at your sales and your return on investment as the true indicator of performance. But buzz can be a quick indicator of getting organic conversation. People are wanting to share this. Then we look at other behaviors like search, and I’m talking about broad search — so AI engine optimization, as well as the normal search engine optimization. We understand that this is a challenge around brand awareness, or brand persuasion, we anticipate that this will travel through to sales. Automation AI has really helped us with and can continue to help us with is take that wealth of data, create some meaning out of it and then allow the human to do what humans do best, which is add their judgment and make decisions and drive innovation through it and drive insight through it. AI can help you distill that into something that is manageable for you as a human then to add your uniquely human skills of judgment, of driving insight, of creativity, which is obviously really important to these campaigns. I’m very much obsessed with this concept of it’s not human does this, machine does this. It’s about the human superpowering the technology. More in Podcasts Meta courts agencies with expanded ad tools while AI reshapes the industry https://digiday.com/podcasts/with-ai-ad-tools-expanding-meta-courts-agencies-while-reshaping-their-role/ As Meta deepens its AI ad push, the company is balancing automation with reassurances to agencies about their place in the advertising ecosystem. Spotify rebuilds ad business around automation, AI to secure bigger media budgets https://digiday.com/podcasts/spotify-rebuilds-ad-business-around-automation-ai-to-secure-bigger-media-budgets/ Spotify is expanding its ad business beyond audio with automation, AI and video as it competes for larger platform budgets. What are digital twins? Marketers weigh the opportunities and risks https://digiday.com/podcasts/what-are-digital-twins-marketers-weigh-the-opportunities-and-risks/ Digital twins are helping brands scale content and talent deals. Marketers are still navigating the tradeoffs.