Unilever reinvents product shoots with AI for faster content creation

Unilever has been at the forefront of innovation since day one. And now we’re applying our pioneering spirit to revolutionise the way we create marketing content.

We’re living in a world with more touchpoints and more channels defining what we buy. For brands, that means more ways to capture attention across media, social, retail and search platforms. Every moment is an opportunity to engage, create and convert desire for our brands.

We need to meet the increasing demand for content, engaging the distinct needs and desires of the 3.4 billion people we serve at a time when their attention is in high demand. Technology helps us to do this, consistently and at scale, while enhancing creativity and improving quality, beauty, speed and cost efficiency.

That’s why we’re working with like-minded partners to reinvent our approach – and one of the biggest unlocks starts with pixel-perfect product images.

Creating digital twins for our brands

Our product images are essential to our brand equity. They help our brands stand out in a crowd, building desirability and reaffirming consistency and quality.

What’s new is that we’re now able to create digital twins of every pack, using technology such as Real-Time 3D, Nvidia Omniverse and OpenUSD. These 3D replicas reflect every measurement, shade and shape to provide a completely accurate digital representation of a product at a level of realism we’ve never been able to achieve before.

Our creatives can then integrate product images into our AI-enhanced creative workflows seamlessly, reducing duplication across the process from an average of five to one. They can also repurpose wording, languages, backgrounds and more from a single product shot, delivering different formats, variants, assets and versions at unprecedented speeds for multiple channels from TV to digital commerce and more.

Executing campaigns with creativity

This efficiency frees up our teams to focus on the human elements of creativity while reducing the costs and energy associated with lengthy technical production processes.

“This isn’t just about pushing out more content – anyone can do that. It’s about starting with a deep understanding of people’s needs and desires, using creativity to create campaigns to cut through and connect with people, and a high-quality content creation machine to deliver desire at scale,” explains Esi Eggleston Bracey, Unilever’s Chief Growth & Marketing Officer.

“Our product twins can be deployed everywhere and anywhere, accurately and consistently, so content is generated faster and on brand. We call it creativity at the speed of life.”

The implications for business growth

It’s not just great for creativity; this is a move that can impact the bottom line too. With digital twins, we can streamline production and marketing processes, reducing the time and costs associated with traditional methods and allowing us to boost desirability and bring products to market faster than ever before.

For example, our Beauty & Wellbeing brands were the first to pioneer this technology and are now integrating digital twins into wider content creation workflows across product lines for TRESemmé, Dove, Vaseline and Clear.

And results are already showing up to 55% in savings and 65% faster turnaround on content creation. Insights show higher engagement with these images, holding users’ attention for three times longer than previous assets, and doubling click-through rates.

“Our digital twins do not work in isolation. We have created bespoke tools at Unilever to integrate them into our content ecosystem,” says Esi.

“We’ve transformed what was once a complex, slow process into a marketing system that frees up our teams to focus on what they do best – think bigger, be creative, push boundaries and create magic for our brands,” she adds.