Unilever’s Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Esi Eggleston Bracey, spoke at the NVIDIA GTC 2025 with creative-tech innovators Collective World and shared how Unilever is pioneering consistent, creative and high-quality product images to elevate the brand experience and build desire at scale.
As part of Unilever’s GAP 2030 strategy, marketing is leading a once-in-a-decade transformation at speed to unlock more creative possibilities. Technology is enhancing human creativity to optimise relevant and personalised content and free up time for marketers to focus on big creative ideas that build brands and earn a purchase.
Real-time, physically accurate 3D technology such as the NVIDIA Omniverse development platform, is helping Unilever to create digital twins of its products, producing product imagery two times faster, 50% cheaper, and leading to 100% brand consistency. Each digital twin contains all its variants, labels, packaging and language formats within a single file, one single digital truth of a product’s data. Adopting Open Universal Scene Description (USD) enables compatibility across Unilever’s systems and suppliers.
By reinventing its methods to create product imagery, Unilever is integrating product images into its content workflows seamlessly, from TV to digital commerce, removing duplication across the process from an average of five to one.
Esi Eggleston Bracey, Chief Growth and Marketing Officer at Unilever, said: “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.
“This isn't about pushing out more content – anyone can do that. It's about starting with a deep understanding of people’s needs and desires, executing our campaigns with creativity and backed by a high-quality content creation machine to deliver desire at scale. 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!”
Untangling content workflows in adopting this innovative approach, TRESemmé Thailand has seen results including:
- an 87% reduction in content creation costs;
- content generated twice as fast; and
- a 5% increase in purchase intent
Beauty & Wellbeing was the first of Unilever’s business groups to pilot the technology and has now integrated it into its wider content creation workflow across product lines for TRESemmé, Dove, Vaseline and Clear. This is showing up to 55% savings and 65% faster turnaround on content, doubling the click-through rate while holding attention three times longer.
By establishing a single digital truth for product images, marketers can now dedicate more time to the creative and innovative aspects of content development. Unilever is scaling AI to reduce complexity and generate more demand for its brands. With over 500 AI applications across the business, Unilever is accelerating creativity and streamlining the creative process.