Unilever's Influencer Bet, One Year Later: Still All In, and What It Did to the Numbers

When I first wrote about Unilever's influencer pivot last spring, the whole thing still read like a wager. The company had just told investors it would put half its advertising money behind social and creators and work with twenty times more influencers than before. That original piece is here: Unilever's Big Bet on Influencers: What It Means for Modern Marketing. More than a year later, the question I keep getting from clients is some version of "did they actually do it, and did it work?" So I went back to the earnings calls and the full-year results to find out.

The short version is that Unilever did not quietly walk this back. They doubled down.

Is Unilever still using influencers, and how far has it gone?

Yes, and the commitment is bigger now than when it was announced. The company is still putting around 50% of its brand and marketing investment into influencers and social, up from roughly 30% in prior years. CEO Fernando Fernandez has only sharpened the message, telling investors that the era of big corporate brand messages is over as the company leans into a social-first demand model.

The scale is the part most people underestimate. Unilever has built what amounts to a distributed network of hundreds of thousands of voices, roughly a 300,000-strong influencer machine, replacing the singular authority of the brand. The original ambition was almost comically literal. Fernandez said he wanted one influencer in each of India's 19,000 zip codes and each of Brazil's 5,764 municipalities. That was not keynote theater. It became the operating model.

You can see it in specific places now. Unilever's Cleanipedia platform works with around 2,000 influencers to create home-care content across TikTok and Instagram for brands like Cif, Persil, and Domestos. And for the 2026 World Cup, where the old playbook would have been wall-to-wall television, the company is instead deploying creators across North America for Rexona, Dove, Axe, and Lifebuoy, framing it as a shift from a one-to-many model to a many-to-many one. Total marketing investment has climbed alongside the channel shift, rising from just over 13% of revenue four years ago to more than 16% today, a level Fernandez had earlier called consciously uncompetitive. So this is not a budget reshuffle. It is more money, pointed at a fundamentally different mix.

What has the influencer strategy done for Unilever's performance?

Here I want to be careful, because the honest answer is more interesting than either a clean win or a clean miss.

Full-year 2025 underlying sales growth came in at 3.5%, with 1.5% from volume and 2.0% from price. On the surface that is softer than 2024's 4.2%. But the trajectory inside the year is the number that matters. Growth accelerated through the year to 4.2% in the fourth quarter, the strongest of 2025, with a balanced contribution from volume and price. The categories Unilever is leaning into hardest performed best, with Beauty & Wellbeing up 4.3% and Personal Care up 4.7%, and Power Brands, about 78% of turnover, leading with 4.3% growth. Headline turnover fell 3.8% to €50.5 billion, but that was driven by currency and disposals rather than weak demand. For 2026 they are guiding to underlying sales growth of 4% to 6%.

So the business is trending the right way while it reallocates spend toward creators. What you cannot do, and what I would push back on if a client tried, is draw a straight line from the influencer budget to those results. Unilever spent the same year reshaping its portfolio, completing the ice cream demerger and acquiring premium brands like Dr. Squatch, Wild, and Minimalist. The premiumization story and the influencer story are tangled together.

And Unilever knows it. The most telling moment for me was Fernandez conceding that the company is still trying to understand the variables that drive return in this new ecosystem, where effectiveness can shift quickly with algorithm and behavior changes. That is a striking admission from the world's largest advertiser after committing half its budget. The spend moved faster than the measurement.

Why the measurement gap is the real story for everyone else

This is the part that matters if you are running a brand in the $5 to $50 million range rather than spending nine billion a year.

The whole industry chased Unilever. As one former Unilever media VP put it, where Unilever goes others follow, and earnings calls from General Mills, Gap, Victoria's Secret, and Bath & Body Works echoed plans to increase creator spend. The knock-on effects were immediate, with micro-influencer rates climbing by as much as 30% year over year and 62% of marketers planning to increase influencer budgets in 2026. The validation has been good for those of us who argued for years that creators belong in the core media plan, not the experimental column. But the unsolved problem traveled with the money. Even with that scale of spend now flowing into these channels, many organizations still cannot clearly link social activity to business outcomes.

That gap is exactly where a smaller, sharper operator can win. You do not need a 300,000-person network. You need to know whether the creator spend you already have is actually incremental, and most teams are flying blind on that. This is the case I make for marketing mix modeling and real incrementality testing all the time. The brands that pair a social-first content approach with honest measurement will pull ahead of the ones that just copied the headline.

There is a quieter point underneath all of this too, and it connects to something I've written about as the Polish Paradox. Fernandez's entire thesis is that polished corporate messaging has lost its grip and that trust now flows peer to peer. That is the trust economy in action. Every brand betting on creator authenticity is implicitly betting that audiences trust a real person over a perfect ad. They are right about the direction. The risk is that influencer content produced at industrial scale eventually starts to feel exactly as manufactured as the advertising it replaced.

I'll keep watching this one. The 2026 numbers, and the World Cup creator push in particular, will tell us a lot about whether the bet compounds or plateaus.

If you are trying to work out how much of your own budget should move toward creators, and more importantly how to measure whether any of it is working, that is the kind of question I help brands answer.

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