By Isabelle Bousquette

Unilever is turbocharging its influencer marketing efforts in an attempt to make products like Dove soap go viral on social media -- and it's using artificial intelligence to do it.

Currently the company works with tens of thousands of influencers and is aiming to grow that by 10 to 20 times over the next year, said Chief Enterprise and Technology Officer Steve McCrystal. Influencer marketing, he said, is "a very powerful avenue for driving growth, and equally we believe it's also powerful for creating credibility."

About half of consumers make purchases at least once a month because of influencer content, he said, citing research from social media software company Sprout Social. Influencers promote Unilever products like Vaseline and TRESemmé hair care, and more recently were integral in helping a cookie-scented line of Dove body-care products go viral, the company said.

In February, Unilever replaced its CEO in an attempt to speed up a major turnaround plan. For years, the company has faced analyst and investor pressure to reinvigorate growth and meet changing consumer trends. Generating more demand for products, especially through social media, is now a key priority for the tech team, McCrystal said.

But to equip its army of influencers, Unilever needs to create exponentially more "assets," or visual components. That's where AI comes in, he said.

"We're now deploying thousands of assets a week across our brands, compared to single digits over months," McCrystal said. Those visuals are passed on to influencers to use in their Instagram posts and TikToks.

Earlier this year, Unilever started using Nvidia's Omniverse platform to create digital twins of all its products, encapsulating a given product's variants, labels, packaging and language formats within a single file for the purpose of generating product imagery faster and cheaper.

The digital twins are fed into Unilever's AI content-generation platform, Gen AI Content Studios, a prompt-based system launched in 2023 that can churn out still images and copy.

Using the platform, Unilever can not only produce an exponentially larger number of personalized brand assets to give influencers, but it can quickly repurpose influencer content for its own social posts, as was the case with a collaboration last year between Dove body care and the popular cookie brand Crumbl.

Dove back then released a limited-edition collection of soaps, scrubs and deodorants inspired by the trend of infusing bath products with food aromas. Unilever said 52% of the overall purchases came from people who hadn't bought Dove before, and credited the more than 3.5 billion earned social impressions with the sales success.

AI was critical to getting those impressions, said Ryu Yokoi, chief media and marketing capability officer, Unilever North America. The company took over 100 discrete pieces of influencer content such as stills and short clips and used generative AI to remix them into different sizes, formats and lengths to tailor it to different audiences on different social-media platforms, he said.

Unilever is seeing proven value in working with human influencers, but one day AI-generated influencers might play a role, according to Yokoi.

"AI is going to impact so many different aspects of this," he said. "I think it depends on the brand and the use."

Write to Isabelle Bousquette at isabelle.bousquette@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

July 08, 2025 07:00 ET (11:00 GMT)

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