Unilever's Branden Goodman on the New Rules of Consumer Discovery

Speaker A: Brand week is back. September 15th through the 17th in downtown Atlanta. And if you're serious about where marketing is going, this is the room for you. I'm Jenny Rooney, chief brand and community officer at Adweek. And for three days, we're bringing together the sharpest minds in marketing for the ideas, insights and connections shaping what comes next for brands. From culture and creativity to growth, leadership and consumer behavior, Brand Week is where brand leaders come to think bigger, connect deep, deeper, and leave with a clearer plan for what's ahead. Get your tickets now@brandweek.com and use code BW26 for 20% off. That's brandweek.com code BW26.

Speaker B: Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now, I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. Uh, so there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment

Speaker C: of $45 for three months, $90 for

Speaker D: six months or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent

Speaker A: to taxes and fees.

Speaker D: Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes.

Speaker A: Me slow when network is busy.

Speaker E: See terms.

Speaker D: I'm proud of the infrastructure that Unilever has built up and their commitment to measurement. The saying that we like to lean on is that we want to be the most outcome driven advertiser in the industry. And a lot of that is not measurement theater. There's far too many metrics to track within the media space. You can get lost. I find that there's always a way to tell a great story when it comes to your media deployment. But at the end of the day, the question that you need to answer is whether or not there's a true commercial impact. And we need to hold our media accountable for business delivery. And we need to use media, the measurement of media, to make better business decisions.

Speaker C: Welcome to today's episode of Creative Commerce. I'm Sarah Hofstetter.

Speaker F: And I'm Rachel Tippograph. And this is a show that talks about what's relevant in commerce for the world's biggest brands. Sarah, we haven't spent that much time talking about one of your new ventures, 37 ARC.

Speaker C: Oh, am I getting a plug? This is so exciting.

Speaker F: You're getting a plug. I'm giving you a plug.

Speaker C: Earn media, baby.

Speaker F: So remind everyone what 37 arc is.

Speaker C: 37 arc is workflow intelligence for marketing. So imagine all of the things that gunk up your ability to get things done as a marketer. You're probably spending more time on project management than you are on actually being a marketer. You're waiting for legal to come back to you with rounds and rounds of reviews. The entire flow of how marketing works is just made up of a bunch of invisible workflows that gunk you up. This is AI that helps understand where you're gunked up and helps rewire it so that you're moving better, faster, cheaper relative to your competition and driving business results and optimizations much, much, much faster. But in short, we make it easier for marketers to do marketing.

Speaker F: So in your first few months of getting this off the ground, you've started to do projects with a bunch of big companies. And what observations have you made in terms of where do you think humans should still be working within marketing?

Speaker C: Creative, full stop.

Speaker F: Anything else?

Speaker C: Oh, absolutely. The number one thing that people talk about when they're like, oh, AI, they're going to take my creative job or we're going to AI all of our creative. And they talk about all of the pilots that they have going on in the creative realm and I'm just like, man. So the part that like has so much taste associated with it and so much nuance associated with it, that's the thing you're going to take away. Whereas there's so many kind of rote components of the way you do work, and that's the thing you don't want to give up. Was just a surprising. It seemed antithetical to me that humans can keep pushing projects along, but AI can fix our dynamic creative problem. And the answer is, I think AI actually can fix the process. But I don't think we're at the point, at least not here in the first half of 2026, ready to surrender our creative to AI.

Speaker F: Any other big thing that you think humans should own?

Speaker C: I think humans should own strategy. The way you go about your partnerships are so critical. Very rarely are you only buying a piece of tech or tools. So often you're making choices about who you're working with and their ability and the trust factor between that. All the m different elements of like credibility, reliability, self orientation. I mean, we're not just buying spots and dots here. We're trying to figure out how to make the right choices. And an algorithm will help. But first you gotta understand where you are. Uh, you gotta look before you leave,

Speaker F: you, you know, well, the reason why I'm giving Sarah this moment of publicity for 37 ARC is we're about to bring.

Speaker C: We're both, by the way, yeah, this is totally unplanned. When Rachel starts every episode, I have no idea what question she is going to ask me. She starts and I am completely caught off guard. I have no idea where she's going to go with this and so I got to roll with it. So I appreciate the plug, but I did not ask for it.

Speaker F: The intros and outros are completely raw, folks. The reason why I teed it up this way is that we're about to bring on, uh, Brandon Goodman at Unilever who is playing a major role in their content and media supply chain. And when you listen to him, he pretty much builds a business case as to why humans are still needed in the world of creative. So let's hear Brandon's take on all things creative, media and AI. Today we are very excited to have Brandon Goodman, the head of media and marketing capabilities for beauty and well being in the US at Unilever. Hello, Brandon.

Speaker G: Hello.

Speaker D: Thank you so much for having me. I'm honored.

Speaker F: Absolutely. Well, you're definitely at the center of Unilever's growth. There's been so much talk around everything that they're doing around the beauty and well being space. But also there's been a tremendous focus at Unilever, I think for generations on media as a vehicle to help build brand and drive growth. When we've been following Unilever over the past, I would say two, maybe three years, Unilever has been very public about being social first, which might mean different things to different brands. So if, if you can one, define what does it mean for Unilever to be social first and two, why as a company are we giving that phrase so much airtime publicly?

Speaker D: Yes, social first is definitely the buzzword of the generation within the walls of Unilever. And I think it's one that I strongly believe in. It's not a new phrase. It's not like we woke up one day and we're like, hey, what's this uh, social media thing? Should we be on it? It's actually an adoption of the recognition of this transition from the follower graph to, to the interest graph and how that interest graph has influenced what consumers expectations are on how brands communicate with them. And what I mean by that, you've got this old model, you'd open up social. The content that you'd be exposed to is based off of who you were following to the new model, influenced by TikTok, where you're subject to the interest graph, right? You are subject to content that you deem or the model assumes is interesting to you. And that algorithmic shift has drastically changed our marketing philosophy and our media philosophy. And at the center of that marketing philosophy is a recognition on how to feed that new algorithm and how to feed it as content. Ultimately we want to be interesting. We want that algorithm to make sure that we find the cohorts that find our communications interesting. And that's ultimately what we mean by social. First, it's appeasing this new algorithm reality. What it doesn't mean is a unstrategic lean towards investing in social disproportionate attention to that channel. This creative reality has shifted the creative norms of all of the other channels across our comms, Think retail media, think display, think video. There's a lot of creative learnings that we get from how we activate within this new interest graph reality. And it absolutely is influencing the way that we're thinking about communicating across all the channels.

Speaker C: We're big supporters. Makes a ton of sense, especially in the spaces that you play. It's a very different approach to classic. And when I say classic I am just going to not even try to be nice about it. Old school CPG marketing, this whole working non working. In order for this social thing to work, you actually have to create a whole bunch of dynamic personalized content at scale. So you go from having these big campaigns with like matching luggage to a very different kind of way of doing that. So in your role in particular, what do you stop doing in order to start making space for that? And how do you think even about how the work flows versus the way it used to?

Speaker D: Yes, I think there's this firm commitment that we need to be less all in on a big creative idea, or at least the creative expression of a big idea, less of that high risk, high reward old school model, as you put it, where the idea translates to a big super shoot, a big commitment to some sort of studio shoot where we take a high fidelity creative and distribute it across all the channels and hope that it sticks to one where we need to commit to higher volume as well as variety of creatives that still express the underlying idea behind the brand's campaign thinking so that we can find the right expression of it. And I think the underlying idea of your question is like operationally how do you do this? Because we have been set up in past to work with our agency partners and the studios that we work with to get that really polished creative out the door. And so this idea of content supply chain, that is the routes that we can tap into to create higher volume and higher variety of creative is an important component as well as the operational infrastructure. Just from a behavioral standpoint of how do you deploy a lot of creative measure it, ask the basic question on what's working, why, why not? And be able to be agile in going back to the drawing board and deploy more of that creative. And so I'm pretty proud of Unilever. Over the last few years, as we've committed to this idea of social first marketing is, we've committed to shifting those two things. Standing up the appropriate content supply chain to unlock agility for our marketers, but also standing up the marketing practice of having those cycles and the measurement infrastructure to get creative out the door and ask what's working and what's not and why so that we can continuously tap back into that content supply chain to once again appease that algorithmic reality that is hungry for more content volume and content variety.

Speaker A: Brand week is back September 15th through the 17th in downtown Atlanta. And if you're serious about where marketing is going, this is the room for you. I'm Jenny Rooney, chief brand and Community officer at Adweek, and for three days we're bringing together the sharpest minds in marketing for the ideas, insights and connections shaping what comes next for brands. From culture and creativity to growth, leadership and consumer behavior, Brand Week is where brand leaders come to think bigger, connect deeper, and leave with a clearer plan for what's ahead. Get your tickets now@brandweek.com and use code BW26 for 20% off. That's brandweek.com code BW26.

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Speaker F: Can you tell us a little bit more about this supply chain? Like without giving away the secret sauce, but what is automated? Where are you working with humans? All that jazz?

Speaker D: Yeah, it's a mix, right? I think there's no perfect route for any piece of creative. It really takes some human thinking around okay, if this is what's working and we need to make more of that, which route is the appropriate one? And there are many. There are creator networks that you could tap into for brand, say creative. There's still going back to the studio, which is still an important component of a mass brand's content supply chain. There's working with influencers and there's having direct relationships with creatives that might be closer to your day to day operations or even in house. And every single scenario stresses the system to ask which one makes most sense. Automation is a unique word in the world of creative because you know, I think everyone's really hungry to understand automation and its role in the content supply chain. What I would say is automation is far more useful in as what I've seen so far and I'm not making this definitive statement that it's always going to be the case moving forward. But less so useful in content origination and more so around the adaptation and remixing and the help to disperse all of this wonderful creative to the copious amounts of channels that we operate within. People don't realize it, but even just having one creative asset transforms into hundreds of permutations of that creative being dispersed for be that the retail media placements or the national or social placements and that exercise of fitting a uh, creative unit into all of those different placements is a very demanding one. And there's awesome ways to automate that process and alleviate some of the resource attention to the wonderful process of just being creative and thinking of that baseline creative that's working. Right. The creative remixing part that automation helps quite a bit within. But then I would say the measurement ecosystem is one that benefits from automation. Measuring creative is this ambiguous space and it's not perfect yet, but there's a lot of signals out there that we have that we like to use automation to help us surface quickly. So it might not directly answer why a creative is working or not, but it at least points your eyes in the direction to say something is working over here. Now you can bring the human element into it and discuss what you're seeing, what you're observing.

Speaker F: So on the measurement front.

Speaker E: Mhm.

Speaker F: Because I know that definitely falls under your purview and Unilever has spent a lot of time doing some really interesting things, especially in house. How are you measuring the ROI of the thousands of pieces of content that Unilever is putting out into the world every day? And the same goes for media.

Speaker D: Yeah, this is an exciting one. And the measurement of media is definitely one that's brought up a lot internally. We spend a lot of money on, uh, media and the powers that be really want to make sure that it's worth it from a commercial lens. I'm proud of the infrastructure that Unilever has built up and their commitment to measurement. The saying that we like to lean on is that we want to be the most outcome driven advertiser in the industry. And a lot of that is not measurement theater. There's far too many metrics to track within the media space. You can get lost. I find that there's always a way to tell a great story when it comes to your media deployment. But at the end of the day, people, the question that you need to answer is whether or not there's a true commercial impact. And we need to hold our media accountable for business delivery and we need to use media, the measurement of media, to make better business decisions. An MMM is critical for that and we rely on it heavily by nature. An MMM is the correlation of your investments to the actual consumption, right? Consumers purchasing your product at the end of the day because they felt compelled to, and that's an incremental purchase. They felt compelled to because of the exposure to your media. And that's a really important part of our measurement ecosystem. But the issue with MMMs is that they're backwards looking. And part of your question was how do you measure all these individual units of creative. If you're familiar with MMMs, the math requires a lot of data to be able to pick up the correlations and the impact of those investments. And oftentimes you're not going to hit those sparsity thresholds at a unit at an individual asset level. And so mmms are one piece of that measurement ecosystem. At Unilever, we've kind of built up this secret recipe that ends up kind of spanning a spectrum. On the left hand of this spectrum would be the distance in which you're measuring after you've actually deployed some sort of activity system, right? And so on the left hand side that would be the MMM. And MMMs are evolving at the speed at which you can read it and you know, the depth and granularity. And we look at that in detail and that is ultimately what helps us drive a lot of those commercial shifts and optimizations that we make. If you move along that spectrum in the middle, that's where you start to get into a bit more of the ambiguous measurements that sit within the cultural resonance space and the social measurement space. And the specific metrics are a mix of ones that we all talk about quite a bit, but we've found that if we focus on them, ultimately they end up paying dividends in the form of better traction that probably will influence what you ultimately read in the mmm. And then all the way on the right hand side of the spectrum, which would be like today, when we're deploying something today and, or this week, there's a mix of kind of faster signals or um, correlative metrics that we have found to be the most correlative to our ability to deliver on roi. And they're a mix of a bunch of signals that are available to us on a daily basis. You know, think about what we deploy within the retail media environment. And then there's this wonderful ad tech called Mic Mac that definitely helps with some of those, uh, signals.

Speaker A: Folks.

Speaker F: I did not pay Brandon to say that.

Speaker C: Sorry, I'm sorry, I didn't quite get that. Can you just say that a little louder?

Speaker D: I think it's called Mic Mac. Um, and that helps us, uh, understand how some of those more creative decisions that we're making on a day to day basis are ultimately driving engagement and our ability to tap into that algorithmic reality that I was talking about before. Right. And so it's nebulous in that like there's all of these metrics that you're kind of looking at across this spectrum and there's no, you know, perfect science to being able to make a truly informed decision at a hundred percent accuracy. But we have found this nice balance across this measurement ecosystem that ultimately we're seeing our ROIs increase, we're seeing our ability to tap into, you know, cultural buzz. I, uh, might be biased, but I believe it's because of the way that we're being scientific about that approach.

Speaker C: I appreciate everything that you're saying and also I like a good linear way of looking at things left to right. So thank you. Despite my being bilingual and also reading right to left and neighbor, but let's just put that aside.

Speaker D: Yeah, okay, nice.

Speaker C: The way you're talking about it makes a lot of sense. The challenge of MMMs is look backs. I mean, I'm sure you, you're preaching to the converted of most of our listenership and yet we still can't, uh, shake them. But in the beginning you talked a lot about the dynamic content and the automation that you do for the dynamic content and where automation makes sense, where automation doesn't make sense, how you go from big campaign to really just dynamically changing for different audiences, for different platforms, for different needs and Then on the other hand we talked about media and the MMMs associated with media. So when you're just talking about the organic content, but the automation of the matching of the creative has to also impact the media itself. How do you balance those two? That theoretically should be two great tastes that taste great together but sometimes could not necessarily melt the right way. Like how do you think about that in terms of like your sequencing and how you avoid, how you avoid error? I mean it just seems like there's a lot going on.

Speaker D: Mhm. There's a role for organic, there's a role for paid, and there's a role for boosting organic. Right. So I would take those three distinct approaches. Organic is a wonderful environment to acquire reach. It's surprising how much reach you can get without putting a dollar behind some creative. And you really need to be culturally relevant in the moment, participating in culture in an authentic way for consumers to, or browsers on these social platforms to really want to engage with your content. You know, we see brands out there actually deploy a really strong commercial profile even just with uh, leaning into the organic space. And there are times where we'll see organic content be that brand say. Right. So expressions coming, our brand handle or influencers that end uh, up delivering such engagement that's appropriate for us to put the boosting behind and that becomes this kind of hybrid environment of paid and boosted. And in those moments we tend to get really efficient returns on what's boosted because we already have the foresight that this is getting, you know, traction and is relevant. And again I'm, I'm speaking just in the context of social. But like of course that content can end up carrying over into other channels that we could do that with confidence that it'll work as well. And then there's the paid track, right. There's a different form of messaging, there's a different objective often in that and the content ends up being a different expression of what we're saying. And that is where you see a lot more of that agility of like diversifying the messaging till we find the message that sticks. And what we mean by sticks is you're rewarded very quickly from the platforms in the form of favorable CPMs. Um, they know when something is attention grabbing is interesting and they reward you and say hey, thanks for you know, advertising. People aren't shutting off their phones because of what you're, you're um, uh, talking about. And so um, we want you to, we want you to be a loyal advertiser and we'll give you A, uh, We'll give you a discount.

Speaker F: You're making the case for great creative. That's human LED with automated variations. Brandon, we have to ask you our famous last question, which is, what's the bravest thing you've ever done?

Speaker D: Yes, I was thinking about this. I think I'm going to lean personal. The bravest thing I've ever done might seem small. It definitely changed my life. And that was taking a shot with my wife. We were in microeconomics class together in university. I only ever saw her during tests or midterms. She seems to skip all other classes. And so when I saw her at the, uh, the final, I. I knew this moment was an important one, and I was quite nervous. But, you know, I stepped up, I said something, and that small moment definitely led to a wonderful partnership. Uh, one that is supporting and loving. We have two beautiful young daughters now. And I gotta say, the ROI on that. That brave moment for me was. Was a big one.

Speaker F: I love that. You know, most people go to finals worrying about the test, but you were worrying about the girl.

Speaker D: I was. I was, and I'm grateful for it. I didn't do too well in the class, but whatever.

Speaker F: Well, Brandon, we appreciate all your insights. This world that you're playing in is changing at light speed, and we will be watching to learn from you.

Speaker D: Thank you so much for the time. Appreciate it.

Speaker F: If you like what you heard and you want to keep listening. About Unilever. We certainly have had various Unilever guests over the years, but go check out an episode we did in 2024 with Ryu, the Chief Digital Officer at Unilever North America. And if you like what you heard, write a review. Thanks for listening.

Speaker A: Brand week is back, September 15th through the 17th in downtown Atlanta. And if you're serious about where marketing is going, this is the room for you. I'm Jenny Rooney, Chief Brand and Community Officer at Adweek, and for three days, we're bringing together the sharpest minds in marketing for the ideas, insights, and connections shaping what comes next for brands. From culture and creativity to growth, leadership, and consumer behavior, Brand Week is where brand leaders come to think bigger, connect deeper, and leave with a clearer plan for what's ahead. Get your tickets now@brandweek.com and use code BW26 for 20% off. That's brandweek.com code BW26.

Speaker G: Hi, I'm Jackie Cooper, global chief brand officer at UH Edelman and the host of Touch of Truth, a new podcast launching on the Adweek Podcast Network. My dad gave me this incredibly smart piece of advice. Meet everyone once. As a result, I've met some of the most fascinating and inspiring people on the planet. Now on Touch of Truth, we're coming centre stage and sharing the mic to experience stories of truth, insights and visions for the future that will challenge your way of thinking. Touch of Truth is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New, uh, episodes come out every Tuesday. I do hope to see you there.