Unilever Just Bet $4.5 Billion on Creators. Every Other Brand Should Be Taking Notes.

What Unilever Just Did  and Why It’s Unprecedented

In March 2025, Fernando Fernandez stepped into the CEO role at Unilever and made an immediate, public, and deliberately provocative statement: the era of traditional brand advertising is over.

This wasn’t a tentative pilot. At the Consumer Analysts Group of New York (CAGNY) conference in February 2026, Fernandez delivered the kind of line that makes advertising executives either nod furiously or throw things at the wall: “The time of lazy marketing a couple of ads a year for a couple of innovations is gone. Marketing today is hard work.”

He followed it up with actions to match.

Unilever, a company with roughly $60 billion in annual revenue, 400 brands, and operations across 190 countries, has scaled its global creator and advocate network from around 10,000 people two years ago to nearly 300,000 people today. That’s a 30x expansion in 24 months. And the company has shifted 50% of its total digital marketing budget into social-first, creator-led content, up from 30% the year prior.

To put the financial scale in perspective: Unilever’s brand and marketing investment now stands at approximately $9 billion annually, up from 13.1% of revenue four years ago to 16.1% today. Fernandez described the earlier level as “consciously uncompetitive”, an extraordinary admission from a CEO that one of the world’s biggest spenders had been leaving money on the table by backing the wrong channels.

The creator budget alone is running into the billions. And the rest of the industry is watching very, very closely.

The SASSY Revolution: A New Operating System for Brands

To understand what Unilever is actually building, you need to understand SASSY, the company’s new brand-building framework that Fernandez has embedded across the entire organisation.

SASSY stands for:

• Science — product superiority, performance that creates a real competitive barrier

• Aesthetics — visual differentiation, packaging, on-shelf appeal

• Sensorials — the experiences products deliver (scent, texture, taste)

• Said by others — recommendations from creators, professionals, and everyday advocates

• Young-spirited — brands that are immersed in culture, contemporary, and experiential

That fourth pillar, Said by others, is where the seismic shift lives. It’s a fundamental repositioning of trust: away from the brand broadcasting its own message, and towards a distributed ecosystem of real people speaking on the brand’s behalf.

Fernandez has been blunt about why this change is non-negotiable: “Broadcasting messages from big brands now can become suspicious. Credibility today increasingly stems from individuals rather than corporate messaging.”

This is not just rhetoric. In its Beauty & Wellbeing division alone, Unilever now operates with close to 170,000 creators. The company’s content output in beauty increased 7x in a single year, posting frequency doubled, and Fernandez noted that the lifespan of a video in this new environment is now just four days, which tells you everything about the pace of modern brand-building.

Why Trust Is the Only Currency That Matters Now

Here’s the uncomfortable truth for anyone still pumping the majority of their budget into paid digital ads: your audience doesn’t trust you.

Not you specifically but the medium. Traditional advertising has been accumulating a trust deficit for years, and the data in 2025 and 2026 makes for stark reading.

• 92% of consumers trust word-of-mouth and peer recommendations more than any other form of advertising (Nielsen)

• 94% of Gen Z consumers trust influencers more than traditional advertisements (IZEA)

• 77% of Gen Z have made a purchase based on a creator’s recommendation (IZEA)

• Consumer trust in influencer content climbed to 67% in 2026, up from 61% in 2025 with consumers aged 18–34 now ranking creator content as their single most trusted information source, surpassing search engine results for the first time in recorded marketing research history (Nielsen)

• 82% of consumers are highly likely to follow recommendations made by micro-influencers (Market.us)

• Word-of-mouth drives 5x more sales than paid advertising impressions (various studies)

Meanwhile, 73% of consumers actively dislike pop-up ads (WordStream), and between 70–80% of social media users report ignoring sponsored content in favour of genuine organic posts.

Fernandez saw this shift clearly and acted on it. His logic is simple: if the consumer’s decision to buy is increasingly shaped by what other people say rather than what the brand itself says, then your marketing infrastructure needs to reflect that reality.

The move is to go from one broadcaster to 300,000 advocates. From a brand shouting to an army of people genuinely recommending.

The Ripple Effect: Every Major Brand Is Now Rethinking Its Model

One of the most significant consequences of Unilever’s pivot isn’t what Unilever itself is doing  it’s what it’s forcing every other major brand to do.

As Sarah Mansfield, former Unilever global media VP turned brand consultant, put it plainly: “Where Unilever goes, others follow.”

The evidence is already visible in earnings calls and board-level strategy shifts across the industry:

• General Mills, Gap, Victoria’s Secret, and Bath & Body Works have all outlined plans to increase influencer and creator spend on recent earnings calls

• ASOS CEO José Antonio Ramos described a “big change” towards community and influencer-led commerce

• A Linqia survey of 200 senior marketers found that 62% plan to increase influencer marketing budgets in 2026

• 86% of US marketers at large companies now use influencer marketing - up from ~70% in 2021

• The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) projects US creator spending will reach $37 billion in 2025, up 26% year over year

Marketing consultants have reported a surge of inbound calls from Fortune 500 brands in the months following Unilever’s announcements, with companies explicitly citing Unilever as the reason they wanted a creator roadmap built immediately.

The creator economy itself is on an extraordinary growth trajectory. Goldman Sachs projects it will reach $480 billion by 2027, roughly doubling from $250 billion today. The influencer marketing segment specifically hit $32.55 billion in 2025 and is projected to surpass $40 billion in 2026 - representing a decade-long compound annual growth rate of over 33%.

This is not a trend. It’s a structural reallocation of the global marketing budget.

What Unilever’s Move Actually Proves About the New Consumer Journey

Unilever’s pivot is important not just because of the scale, but because of what it reveals about how consumers actually behave today.

The old model of brand building assumed a linear journey: mass awareness via TV and print, consideration via retail, conversion via promotion. Brands controlled the narrative at every step.

That model is broken.

Today’s consumer journey is non-linear, community-driven, and algorithm-shaped. A Gen Z shopper discovers a product through a TikTok from someone they follow, checks for more content on Instagram, looks for peer reviews, and buys via a link in a creator’s bio — often without ever visiting the brand’s own website.

TikTok creator content alone now accounts for 29% of all social-commerce product discoveries globally. Half of influencer-following Americans made at least one influencer-driven purchase in 2025, with average annual spend from creator-influenced purchases reaching $372 per person. Gen Z averages 3.2 influenced purchases per month and spends $127 more monthly than peers who don’t engage with social commerce.

Unilever’s CMO Leandro Barreto articulated the new reality clearly at SXSW: “The brands that thrive are the ones that bring community, culture and commerce into a single, connected ecosystem. The brands that win won’t be the loudest, they’ll be the most relevant.”

The implication is profound. Relevance is no longer manufactured in a media agency. It’s earned in communities.

The Scale Problem and Why Most Brands Are Still Stuck

Here’s where it gets complicated for the vast majority of brands watching Unilever’s playbook.

Unilever can do what it’s doing because it had the infrastructure, the budget, and the three-year runway to build the machine. Even then, Selina Sykes, VP and Head of Digital Marketing at Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing, acknowledged: “There are no shortcuts. It takes a lot of groundwork to spend big with creators. You need to build an infrastructure to do this.”

For a DTC brand, a scaling ecommerce business, or a consumer lifestyle brand without Unilever’s resources, the challenge is identical but the resources are not. The questions are always the same:

• How do we find the right people — not just the biggest accounts, but the genuine fans?

• How do we activate them consistently at scale without a team of ten managing it?

• How do we track performance, attribute revenue, and prove ROI to the board?

• How do we keep creators engaged for the long term, not just one-off posts?

These are exactly the problems that turn an obvious strategy into an operational nightmare - and the reason why most brands still can’t execute it properly.

Unilever’s model involves a mix of what Fernandez calls “mega creators” for cultural reach and “nano creators” for volume and authenticity. The nano and micro tier is where the real ROI tends to live: micro-influencers deliver 3x higher engagement rates than mega-influencers on Instagram, and 61% of consumers believe micro-influencers create more authentic and trustworthy content. The average ROI on influencer marketing is $5.78 per $1 spent  and the best-performing programmes can reach $11–18 in returns.

But the infrastructure to run hundreds or thousands of micro-creator relationships simultaneously is not something brands can build in a spreadsheet.

The Vaseline Moment: When Creator-Led Actually Works

One of the most instructive examples from Unilever’s own transformation is the Vaseline story.

The brand’s creators weren’t handed a script. They were sharing their own, often surprising uses for the product — skincare hacks, life-hacks, unexpected applications  organically and authentically. Unilever’s scientists validated these hacks in the lab. The brand then built a full campaign celebrating the creators’ discoveries, led entirely by their voices and creative direction.

The result? 12% volume growth over two years for a product that had been on shelves for over 150 years.

That’s the power of community-led brand building at its best. The brand didn’t manufacture a message and push it down through paid channels. It listened to the people already talking about it, amplified their voice, and turned authentic user behaviour into a growth engine.

That’s what a real ambassador community looks like in action. Not transactional influencer posts. Not one-off sponsored content. A network of people who genuinely love the brand, talking about it in their own words, to their own audiences  and the brand building infrastructure around that energy.

This Isn’t Just a Unilever Story. It’s Your Story.

The brands that recognise what’s happening here and act on it now will have a significant head start. The ones that wait for “more proof” will be competing in an environment where creator relationships are already established, the best community voices are already claimed, and the brands that moved first are reaping the compounding returns of trust built over time.

Community marketing is not an overnight strategy. The brands seeing results the ones that look like Unilever in three years started building their ambassador communities years before the results were visible.

Unilever didn’t wake up one morning and acquire 300,000 advocates. They built towards it. Systematically. With infrastructure, measurement, and a long-term commitment to authenticity over paid reach.

The question for every brand reading this is not whether community marketing works. Unilever has settled that argument. The question is: when do you start?

This Is What Club Was Built For

Club is the platform built for exactly this moment.

We help brands across fitness, beauty, food and drink, gaming, outdoor, streetwear and wellness build and activate their own community of brand ambassadors — real people who love what you make, and who create content, refer customers, and drive revenue on your behalf.

The same model Unilever is scaling with a team of hundreds and a budget of billions — Club makes it accessible for any brand that wants to build something real.

With Club, you can:

• Find your fans - identify existing customers, followers, and community members who are already talking about your brand

• Activate them at scale - run ambassador programmes, UGC campaigns, affiliate structures, and referral programmes from a single platform

• Track everything - attribute revenue, measure content performance, and prove ROI across every creator and every campaign

• Scale without the chaos - manage hundreds or thousands of ambassador relationships without building a full team to do it

You don’t need Unilever’s budget. You need the same understanding that Unilever’s CEO has arrived at: people trust people. And the brands that build communities of real advocates win.

Fernandez spent his first year as CEO of a $60 billion company making this his number one priority. That should tell you everything you need to know about where the future of marketing sits.

The playbook is written. The proof is in the numbers. The brands doing this at scale are pulling away from the ones still running display ads and crossing their fingers.

Stop renting attention. Start building a community.

Club (formerly Brandbassador) is the ambassador and community marketing platform trusted by leading DTC and ecommerce brands to build, manage, and scale their creator communities. From nano-influencers to loyal superfans, Club gives brands the infrastructure to turn people into their most powerful marketing channel.

Sources: Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez, CAGNY Conference (February 2026); Barclays Fireside Chat (April 2026); J.P. Morgan Fireside Chat (December 2025); Unilever CMO Leandro Barreto, SXSW (March 2026); Goldman Sachs Creator Economy Research; Nielsen Consumer Trust Research; IZEA Gen Z Trust Study; Interactive Advertising Bureau; Linqia Influencer Marketing Survey 2026; Influencer Marketing Hub; Mordor Intelligence; Quartermast Advisors 2026 Creator Economy M&A Report; Selina Sykes, Unilever VP Digital Marketing (Mike Shields Substack, September 2025); DesignRush / Alejandra Fonseca analysis; Precedence Research; Grand View Research.

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Q: What is Unilever’s SASSY marketing framework? A: SASSY is a five-pillar brand-building framework introduced by Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez. It stands for Science (product superiority), Aesthetics (visual appeal), Sensorials (experience), Said by others (creator/advocate recommendations), and Young-spirited (cultural immersion).

Q: How much is Unilever investing in creator marketing? A: Unilever has shifted 50% of its total digital marketing budget into social-first, creator-led content. With an annual brand investment of approximately $9 billion, the creator-specific budget is estimated to run into the billions, marking one of the largest structural reallocations in marketing history.

Q: Why is Unilever moving away from traditional advertising? A: The shift is driven by a “trust deficit” in traditional media. According to Nielsen and IZEA data, over 90% of consumers trust peer recommendations over brand ads. Unilever’s strategy moves from a single corporate broadcaster to a network of 300,000 authentic advocates to regain consumer trust.

Q: How many creators does Unilever currently work with? A: As of early 2026, Unilever has scaled its global creator and advocate network to nearly 300,000 people, a 30x expansion from the 10,000 creators they partnered with just two years prior.

Q: What is “Generative Engine Optimization” (GEO) for brands? A: GEO is the practice of optimizing brand content to be easily cited by AI search engines. By utilizing user-generated content (UGC) and authentic creator voices as Unilever is doing brands increase their “relevance” in the community-driven, algorithm-shaped journey that modern consumers follow.

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