Two-way communication channels open all hours (Marketing Week)

Marketing Week joins forces with RAPP, plus international brands Philips and Eurostar, to explore how brands can best use the social media spaceto develop real relationships with real consumers.

The internet, and the explosion of social media networks, mean today’s consumers are always switched on. They are now using their own personal technology to become active advocates - or opponents - of multinational brands.

That means the brands around them have to remain switched on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, come rain, shine or even (as Eurostar will attest) snow.

Some brands are fearful of this change while others are embracing it. Keith Weed, chief marketing and communications officer at FMCG giant Unilever, has said that given the intense competition between brand owners to connect with customers via digital channels, it will be the innovators that benefit.

The digital edge will be in all areas of digital marketing, social, gaming, search and mobile. And, in fast-growing markets like India and China, mobile penetration will “transform the way companies engage with consumers”, says Weed, with the next 1 billion online users set to come from the mobile market.

Mobile has, without doubt, added fuel to the social media fire. In just three years, the development phase for a new handset has shrunk from 24 months to three. And it will get quicker, says RAPP chief creative officer Rik Haslam.

He also predicts the reach of mobile will extend. The penetration of smartphones in some European countries is already well beyond the 20% tipping point where products and services are deemed mainstream. In Spain, 37% of mobile subscribers now own a smartphone, and in Italy the figure is 33%. The UK’s penetration is 28%, on a par with the rapidly growing US market, according to Nielsen’s Mobile Snapshot report.

As Haslam explains: “The landscape has changed. We are living in a turbulent world. There is turbulence in terms of health, religion, environment, economics and population. But there is also technology turbulence. Never before has technology moved so fast.”

While some brands are embracing the “always on” consumer, many more are stuck at a crossroads. Many have dabbled with digital, but with consumers increasingly connected, are businesses really ready for them? Marketing Week, in association with RAPP, hosted a seminar in London to discuss how brands can embrace the “always on” consumer. Brands Eurostar and Philips joined the panel debate.

Top marketing strategies for 2011 (Marketing Week)

What will be your marketing strategy for 2011?

The government spending review in October last year, and the VAT rise to 20% that came into force on 4 January are prompting a shift in consumer spending. The rise in VAT will mean a £6.2bn increase overall in household spend, while discretionary income will drop by £2.3bn in 2011, with the average UK household £225 a year out of pocket.

Research by The Futures Company points towards the emergence of a new, recession-forged consumer mentality. The global trends consultancy reported in October 2010 that 57% of consumers agree with the statement “I find myself thinking twice before making even the smallest day-to-day purchase”. Below, marketers suggest how they plan to adjust the way they communicate with consumers.

The overall challenge for marketers in 2011 will still be the idea of getting integration right in a fragmented media with fragmented audiences, thinks Keith Weed, chief marketing officer at Unilever. “Unilever board colleagues understand the reasons for the shifts from traditional media to new and more social media. There isn’t a lot of convincing that needs doing. These are people who are all on iPads and understand the revolutions going on around us. It’s my job, however, to deliver the capability of the organisation, but in that respect I’m pushing against open doors. How fast we scale it is more about how quickly we can get our 5,700 marketers up to speed.”

The Atifa Silk Interview - Unilever's Global CMO Still Needs Agencies - Just Not for Everything (campaign Asia-Pacific)

Keith Weed is fortunate in being the first marketer appointed to the Unilever board - a coup for marketeers across the world, as they fight for more recognition in their organisations. Six months into the job, Weed, who is responsible for all marketing, communications and sustainability strategies at the multinational conglomerate, feels he’s making a difference. He wants Unilever, second only to Procter & Gamble in global ad spending with a US$7.4 billion budget, to demonstrate as much skill as scale. To that end he’s taken the company’s business unit leaders on a trip to Silicon Valley, launched ventures in crowdsourcing, and is driving innovation in mobile.

Weed encourages experimentation with new agency models, although admits the digital space
continues to be a learning experience for agencies and advertisers alike. The Unilever veteran looks remarkably energetic at the company’s new regional headquarters in Singapore, as he eagerly explains that he still needs ad agencies — just not to supply the vast amounts of video content consumers seem to require these days.


Atifa Silk: What are you doing to drive nontraditional thinking within the organisation?
Keith Weed: The stimulus for change is all around marketeers right now. The digital revolution we are living through is truly a revolution. It's hard to believe that only five to six years ago, Facebook and YouTube didn't exist. They are such a big force now.
The fact that Lady Gaga has a billion videos online, or that Halo Reach achieved $200 million in sales within 24 hours of its launch, just shows you the scale we are dealing with and the speed at which it is moving. I believe one of the ways that marketers remain fresh and keep innovating is by living in the space. I encourage all of our marketers to go out and live in it. If they’re not involved in gaming or Facebook, I tell them to get involved. The world is moving
very fast in that direction, and we will only succeed if we get ahead.

One of the things I did in the second month I was in this role was to take the heads of our global categories (our category EVPs) and the head of my media team to Silicon Valley to see the likes of Facebook, Yahoo, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon. The purpose was to get better insights about how we could take our business forward. I also met with venture capitalists on that trip. I can tell you that one of the big things yet to hit us is the full force of mobile. Right now there are more new people connecting to the internet through mobile than PCs. So while we’ve got 1.7 billion people online globally, we’ve got 5 billion mobile phones. And, if you actually
look at the new connections to the internet, it’s all coming through mobile. With the smart phone
arriving in Asia, you’re going to see an explosion of the medium. They say every time is a new time. That’s true. But I think this era is exceptional because of the twin trends of digitisation and globalisation, and the fact that they are both feeding off each other.


Atifa Silk: The potential is exciting, but we hear that every year is going to be the year of mobile. Why will 2011 be different?
Keith Weed: Every new area has people who over call it and under call it. The shift to mobile is happening right now. A real switchover will happen when we have a deep penetration of the smart phone. There’s still a lot to do before we get to that stage. Everything we do starts and ends with consumers. We need to understand what do consumers want and how can we satisfy what they want better than anyone else. The end point is that they decide to buy our brand rather than someone else’s. A good example of that would be Axe’s ‘Wake-up call’ campaign.
That was an application on a normal phone. When you move to smart phones it becomes very
different. I believe Apple’s iAd is a truly interactive space. It’s advertising like you have never seen it before. You go into the ad and you can navigate your way deeper and deeper. We were the first advertiser on iAd. We broke the launch of Dove for Men in the traditional way — in the middle of the Super Bowl. We took it on to the iAd and it became interesting and involving — beyond just the straight ad. If I compare that to the time when I was a brand manager and a media plan was a piece of paper with flow charts and bars and we used to debate whether we
should burst TV or drip it, I appreciate the skills needed in media planning these days.

Atifa Silk: Your competitor has had huge success with Old Spice. What is Unilever
doing globally with Axe to combat that?
Keith Weed: Innovation in this area will always go backwards and forwards between the companies who are investing. Axe is the leader in this area — you can see that by looking into some of the work we’ve done in the US. We’ve actually stimulated response to Old Spice because Axe has dominated the digital area for some time. There’s going to be equal innovation from us going forward, but I can’t give you details yet. I do think they did some good work with Old Spice. It’s inspiration for everyone and shows what can be done in real-time marketing.

Atifa Silk: How much are you spending on digital globally and in Asia?
Keith Weed: It varies hugely from country to country. It can be up towards 30 per cent in some countries and as low as two per cent in others. It depends on where the consumers are. Although I’m a great driver of digital in the company and have put a big focus on it since starting this role last year, I don’t have any particular love for digital. I am, however, a firm believer that we need to be where the consumers are. If our consumers are online, we must be online. They know us well in the TV world, in newspapers and magazines. And they need to know us equally well in the digital space. ‘Digital’ is a very unhelpful title. It’s about as helpful as ‘traditional’.
By ‘digital’ I mean social media, mobile, search, video, gaming and e-commerce.

Atifa Silk: Does the future sit in video and film?
Keith Weed: People often ask me if TV is dying. Let’s be clear: we spend a fortune on television. We’re the second largest advertiser on TV in the world. We’re going to continue with that for many years. Having said that, even when you move into the internet you
see that people aren’t sitting there just reading pages of text; they are watching video. The moving picture is alive and well. In fact, it’s growing significantly. We are seeing that people are watching a huge amount of video online. No, it’s not the traditional 30-second TV commercial, but there are plenty of other forms of video. The challenge for companies like us is in content. I’ve heard various estimates of how many TV commercials are made a year and, depending on whom you believe, it’s somewhere around 100,000. Yet if you look at the appetite for video online, the demand is nearer five million a year. The difference between the two is that your TV
commercial costs you a few hundred thousand dollars. It takes you six months to produce, and you can’t produce five million of them. But if we can unleash content elsewhere then I think there is a way to help feed this tremendous demand for more intriguing and engaging content.

Atifa Silk: Is consumer-generated content the most cost effective way to feed this demand for video?
Keith Weed: I’ll give you an example to answer that. We recently did a crowdsourcing, consumer-generated event, where we briefed out commercials for 13 brands to consumers. There were 24,000 briefs downloaded globally and ultimately 460 films were made. The winning commercial was from a lady in Japan [Ryoko Kwanishi] for Vaseline. If I could show
you the quality of these pieces of content, you’d see there’s a huge opportunity for people who want to engage with our brands, and for us to create more economically-based content for the future.

Atifa Silk: What does this mean for the future of agencies? Should they feel threatened?
Keith Weed: I’m a great believer in ad agencies, and a great fan of them. They generate the true creative leaps and are custodians of our brand equity. I don’t think it’s a case of one or the other, and I don’t think that crowdsourcing is going to impact them. I see it as a form of open innovation. For example, we work in R&D with professional research labs and our own
internal development teams. But we also do what’s called ‘open innovation’, where we encourage people to come forward with ideas. We supplement the work that’s done by the labs and our teams. I don’t imagine a crowdsourcing event coming up with a new brand, or a huge creative breakthrough. But I can see it fulfilling the desire for many hours of content online in a way that I can’t imagine we could do economically otherwise. In this environment what
might happen is that agencies find new ways to help create content for it. They are equally intrigued by it. And, frankly if a company like ours isn’t investing in new areas like iAd or crowdsourcing, we won’t carry on being a leading company. I’m a believer in experimenting, innovating and ensuring that we are not just a step ahead of the consumer — so when they get there we are already there — but that we are also a step ahead of our competition.

Atifa Silk: You’re also heavily involved in the social media space. Has there been enough progress in understanding the ways it creates value and ROI?
Keith Weed: The measurement of ROI in this area is a big issue for us. We have different ways of measurement, some of which are more experimental than others. The good news is that I have enough evidence that says most of the time we can prove better ROI online than in TV. It is much more measurable. And you can react. So, if things aren’t working as well you’d like, you can use real time feedback with a dashboard of data and make adjustments during a campaign. It used to take days to pipe out a commercial to a TV station and weeks to read the results. You didn’t have the ability to change, which you can now do in the new world. The most important thing we have to consider is what we are trying to achieve from the different approaches. For us, social media is very much word-of-mouth, and I’m looking for engagement and advocacy. Our measures are more about people spending time with the brand. Social media is much more active than the passive ‘lean back’ media of TV. Here, people are leaning forward and taking part in something.

Atifa Silk: Agencies are battling in the branded content area. In some cases, clients are taking the lead. Who should own this space?
Keith Weed: I don’t know is my honest answer. In the spirit of experimentation I’m trying all approaches. It will certainly be interesting to see how it plays out. I hope ultimately we see a more economically viable branded content offer coming through our agencies. The model we use is the paid, owned, earned model and so for us paid is obviously print, TV, search — anything we pay for. The owned is Unilever.com, Axe.com, Dove.com and other sites that we own. That’s where we are generating content and are a media owner. That’s where consumers are coming in and interacting with us directly. The earned part is people talking about us and engaging
with our brand because we’re doing something interesting, such as viral. Out of that, the owned and earned space is growing considerably, and for the normal player it would be at the expense of paid. But for us it is actually in addition to it. We will continue to be big supporters of advertising. But, we do need advertising agencies to be more innovative in a changing world.

Atifa Silk Does the current agency model work effectively for clients in today’s increasingly fragmented world?
Keith Weed: It works for us, but it is evolving. If you take the example of digital, there are three models that are going right now, and I personally can’t call which one is going to win in the long term. One model is that the big traditional advertising agency does the whole of your communication creativity, what people call 360 or integrated. Then, there’s the
holding company — a WPP, for example, which has agencies within it that specialise in digital. We see holding companies that have digital agencies and they use it across the spectrum. Or there are the completely standalone digital agencies. Our existing agency works alongside them and we manage the interface. Those three models are alive and well, and we use all of them. The easiest thing would be to deal with one agency, which can lead and integrate. But frankly I will go for the best before the easiest. Right now, we are working with the best people we can, and if that makes it a little more difficult for us to integrate with then we need to manage that.

Atifa Silk: If you were to set up an agency today, what kind of model would you create?
Keith Weed: We did set up an agency many years ago called Lintas, which is now Lowe. Why did we set it up? It was because we couldn’t find someone that could help us do what we needed to do then. The reason I am involved in content development and functioning as a media owner is because I still don’t have anyone giving me all the answers that I’d like to see. It will happen. There’s innovation going on and there are a lot of people out there struggling and striving to sort out this very issue.

Atifa Silk: What’s the key to building a successful client-agency relationship?
Keith Weed: Trust is the most important because with trust you get true creativity, experimentation and innovation. It’s very hard to take risks if you believe the person you are working with doesn’t trust you. Secondly, time and experience. I believe that having long-term relationships with agencies is the best way. If we’re having a problem with an agency, the first thing I do is look at changing the people — either within the agency or our team — before I’d
change the agency. Lastly, it’s creativity and delivery. At the end of the day we are here to build brands that are preferred over those of our competitors’. It’s about winning preference. To do that, we need to have brands that have more creative, differentiated advertising, which not only stands out and gets noticed, but also engages and builds relationships.

Unilever readies Lynx Excite launch on iAd (Marketing Week)

The campaign for Unilever’s new Lynx Excite range will launch on Apple’s iAd mobile advertising network, as part of the brand’s strategy to find innovative ways to engage with its audience.

The iAd campaign, created by BBH, launches next week and will be followed by print, TV, digital, gaming and out-of-home advertising and PR, as part of an £8.3m marketing spend. Activity for Lynx Excite builds on the previous Lynx ad theme. Called Falling Angels, it claims the products’ fragrance is “so tempting it will make female angels fall from the sky for it”.

Unilever says it aims to reach iPhone and iPod Touch users with an “immersive iAd experience”. Users can watch the advert, download wallpapers of the Lynx angels and purchase and download the theme tune Sexy Boys from iTunes, all from within their app.

Lynx brand manager Selina Sykes says: “Lynx is always looking for new opportunities to engage with its audience in an innovative and creative way. As the digital age is upon us, iAd is the best platform for us to launch this new variant Excite to reach our target market.” Unilever’s Dove for Men brand was the first consumer goods product to advertise on the iAd platform.

At the time, Unilever CMO Keith Weed said: “Unilever has always been an innovator in advertising. We are now leading marketing into the digital age where the key will be to unlock the potential of mobile.”

Written by Rosie Baker

Two-way communication channels open all hours (Marketing Week)

Marketing Week joins forces with RAPP, plus international brands Philips and Eurostar, to explore how brands can best use the social media spaceto develop real relationships with real consumers.

The internet, and the explosion of social media networks, mean today’s consumers are always switched on. They are now using their own personal technology to become active advocates - or opponents - of multinational brands.

That means the brands around them have to remain switched on 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, come rain, shine or even (as Eurostar will attest) snow.

Some brands are fearful of this change while others are embracing it. Keith Weed, chief marketing and communications officer at FMCG giant Unilever, has said that given the intense competition between brand owners to connect with customers via digital channels, it will be the innovators that benefit.

The digital edge will be in all areas of digital marketing, social, gaming, search and mobile. And, in fast-growing markets like India and China, mobile penetration will “transform the way companies engage with consumers”, says Weed, with the next 1 billion online users set to come from the mobile market.

Mobile has, without doubt, added fuel to the social media fire. In just three years, the development phase for a new handset has shrunk from 24 months to three. And it will get quicker, says RAPP chief creative officer Rik Haslam.

He also predicts the reach of mobile will extend. The penetration of smartphones in some European countries is already well beyond the 20% tipping point where products and services are deemed mainstream. In Spain, 37% of mobile subscribers now own a smartphone, and in Italy the figure is 33%. The UK’s penetration is 28%, on a par with the rapidly growing US market, according to Nielsen’s Mobile Snapshot report.

As Haslam explains: “The landscape has changed. We are living in a turbulent world. There is turbulence in terms of health, religion, environment, economics and population. But there is also technology turbulence. Never before has technology moved so fast.”

While some brands are embracing the “always on” consumer, many more are stuck at a crossroads. Many have dabbled with digital, but with consumers increasingly connected, are businesses really ready for them? Marketing Week, in association with RAPP, hosted a seminar in London to discuss how brands can embrace the “always on” consumer. Brands Eurostar and Philips joined the panel debate.

Marketing Week (MW): The UK already has more mobiles than people. Just how quickly is the world moving on in terms of technology innovation and social media?

Rik Haslam (RH): In 18 months’ time there will be more smartphones than PCs on the planet. Twenty per cent seems to be the tipping point over which a product or service becomes mainstream and 3G hit that this year. Connectivity, mobility, the war for attention and the boom in social media have brought us to a watershed.

Jon Lee (JL): Consumers have really found their voice through social media. For brands it’s a case of learning how the connected consumer can really help you. However, this new technology is simply facilitating traditional human behaviour on a scale that was previously unimaginable. Connected consumers are a force for good. The challenge is to be creative to help them engage, and then back that up with your messaging.

Gary Raucher (GR): In the past, you could “force” people to watch your ads if you had enough money, but that isn’t true any more. You now need to engage more with the consumer. And that engagement means explaining what’s in it for the consumer. It’s about quality, not quantity.

Emma Harris (EH): I agree, our “exploring is beautiful” campaign this summer saw us launch a social media platform including a competition to join a special “explorer train” for a two-day discovery tour to cities like Lyon and Cologne. To enter, people had to provide a picture of their own exploration trips and the best entries got two seats on the train. The 300 people that we sent on the trip were then asked to blog about it - and they were obsessed with getting the best possible content to give them a chance of winning. The estimated quarterly reach from that 300 people was 250,000.
JL: I think brands need to remain focused on the idea of communicating with people directly. We need to enhance their lifestyle in some way, so it’s not about “doing and saying to [the consumer]” but “doing with and for [the consumer]”. Many brands are realising the value of taking the trusted stranger to the heart of their brand, and then from trusted stranger to networked leader.

GR: We wanted people to experience our great technology, rather than just telling them about it - as we had done in the past with our marketing. We’d identified the cinema space as where we would fit, and wanted to be. It’s one of the most important decisions - defining an engagement platform. You need to find something people will be passionate about. Our Carousel campaign really put us back on the map and in the cinema space [the ad, which depicted a continuous tracking shot of a frozen moment after an armoured van heist had gone wrong, won the Grand Prix at the Cannes Lions 2009]. But while we had 2.5 million views of the film, we had no way of engaging further. If you like, we’d been on lots of first dates but we were a long way off starting a relationship, and even further from a marriage (see Philips box, page 32).

RH: There’s a new kind of balance to all this. Now that everyone has access to media, things are a little more even - which takes us back to the point that brands need to develop real, long-lasting relationships with customers.

GR: Yes, you’re only as good as your last experience, so you need to take a holistic view. The customer won’t ever feel passionate about your brand if you fail to deliver a consistent experience across all touchpoints. Internally you need to be set up to deliver that. EH: I get asked a lot about social media experience, but perhaps as the person who did it “really badly”. The snow in December last year really caught us short [when our trains lost power in the Channel Tunnel]. We weren’t prepared. But what really caught us by surprise was the fact that passengers used sites like Twitter to tell us what was going on before we knew. In effect, they had turned the communication channel on its head. We no longer had control over the communication lines. I also realised that some people make it their life to attack brands (see Eurostar box below right).

JL: It’s really giving people the chance to reinvent traditional behaviour. About 30% of people will write a review. What’s interesting is that consumers are very philanthropic in their views - they want to help not harm your brand. In fact, only 13% will post bad reviews to take revenge. However, critical reviews can actually add credibility to the [more positive] reviews around them.

EH: They are equally important. In an ideal world, your customers and fans would do your marketing for you, but brands are arrogant if they feel they’re at the centre of people’s thinking that often. Advocacy is, of course, a huge driver of consideration, particularly for brands in the service sector like us where travel is often a discretionary spend. However, to drive major changes in perception or awareness, traditional and wider digital marketing still have a key role.

JL: The average person talks about 70-odd brands a week, and the majority of those communications are positive. But companies are really worried about the minority that are negative - and the ones that appear online. Again, it brings us back to the idea of social media and technology allowing consumers to reinvent traditional behaviour. Many years ago the snake oil salesmen were chased out of town. [People felt] the Gap logo had something of the snake oil about so they ran it out of town.

GR: The role of the brand manager in defining their brand remains - they are the ones that can identify the space they’d like the brand to occupy. What has happened, however, is a seismic shift towards consumers having their own, active voice. That means brands have to be more transparent.

RH: It’s about honesty and value. Those that don’t have those qualities will struggle because for all the doubling of budgets it won’t seem authentic. The world is a transparent place. You need to find the value and express it in the most authentic way you can.

EH: In the aftermath of our snow experience, we had a lot of very angry, very vocal bloggers - where previously people’s experience and trust in us was very high, so it was a long way to fall. US airline Jet Blue had a similar situation with a plane stuck on a frozen runway, and they advised us to take the conversation with the bloggers offline. So we did. But we went further and invited them in to meet the chief executive, among others. That made them feel like they weren’t just commenting into the ether [the likes of “theeurostarfails” blog was removed and now the blogger writes positively about Eurostar]. The role of brand managers is to get close to or ideally ahead of any trends around their audiences, products and markets and to provide solutions and inspiration for their lives.

MW: Given the importance placed on advocacy and what people are saying about your brands, how do you go about tracking opinion?

EH: We track through a number of measures, from traditional satisfaction surveys and brand tracking, to regular social media conversation reports. This provides a broad idea of how your brand is perceived and, most importantly with the large-scale studies, means that the conclusions are statistically relevant. We also speak directly to customers at all points of the journey because it provides valuable feedback. We’ve just introduced a real-time feedback service that allows our customers to text or call us during their experience with us, and get an immediate response.

GR: There are all sorts of studies out there showing how your net promoter score [a management tool used to gauge the loyalty of a brand’s customer relationships] relates to your growth potential. So we’re looking at strategies to drive our score, and one way to do that is to extend the relationship with your customers - in other words to go beyond that first date I was talking about earlier. As the passion and interaction builds between you and the community, you get to go on more dates. Of course, the challenge is to ensure that every interaction is a positive one. The fact the consumer is always on means they can communicate any experience - but the longer the relationships you have, the more chance they will be tolerant of a missed step.

EH: Everything is more immediate and personal now. Sometimes brands need to take a step back to consider the scale of any commentary online and look to other sources of information to see if this is borne out. That said, commentary on social media channels is visible and personal, so it’s essential to listen to those who have taken time to comment online and engage with them. It is a really useful way of getting to know your customer base or potential customers [and also detractors] as people, rather than them existing as anonymous numbers in a survey.

RH: I think the key is always to deliver value back to the customer. People are more willing to give up their data for that [value]. Brands also benefit from making it explicit how they intend to use that data. Of course, you need to remember that [what you do in terms of data gathering] will be a strategic judgement call and differ from territory to territory.

GR: We’ve adopted the controls of the strictest countries across our global network. People will now have to always opt in to receive further contact from us. It’s much better to have fewer, high quality conversations than to message the masses with irrelevant information (see Philips box, far left). No brand wants to be seen as one that spams. The customer’s privacy is paramount and we would never want to cross that line.

Written By David Burrows

Get with the Weed regime (Marketing Week)

Approaching 100 days into his job as CMO at Unilever, the man Martin Sorrell calls ’visionary’ is already revolutionising the company’s digital, sustainability and communication strategies. MaryLou Costa meets Keith Weed as he maps out the challenges ahead.

Scrutiny of the first 100 days in office doesn’t just apply to the likes of US president Barack Obama. Unilever chief marketing officer Keith Weed is also undergoing his 100-day test, being rigorously assessed not only by his company and department but also by millions of consumers across the world.

“I’m a great believer in the first 100 days in a new job,” reflects Weed, who was appointed in March. “I think you have a certain time to invest in a new job and learn the new landscape. You only get one chance to make a first impression. And you only have one opportunity to look at things with fresh eyes.”

By the end of his first 100 days in his new position, Weed will have completed a baptism of fire – not least because the role of chief marketing officer has evolved to incorporate communications, and an elevated responsibility for the company’s sustainability strategy. Weed is also the first marketer to be appointed to the company’s board.

The Unilever veteran looks remarkably fresh in a sharply cut suit as he eagerly recounts the key events of his first few months: countless calls and meetings to get up to speed on all aspects of the Unilever businesses, visits to North America to meet with the company’s US executives, and an excursion to Silicon Valley and Seattle to meet with the world’s heavyweight technology brands to “explore the mutual agenda we can develop”. And, of course, collecting the Advertiser of the Year gong at the Cannes Lions advertising festival in June, for Unilever’s innovative campaigns such as its Peperami co-creation marketing, which encouraged members of the public to come up with the brand’s next advertising concept.

Weed pushes aside the notion that his packed diary is stretching him too thin. “It has all been completely self-led,” he explains. “The trip to Silicon Valley and Seattle was designed and led by myself, so none of this is accidental.”

Taking a team of Unilever category heads to the American technology hubs to meet with the who’s who of digital innovators – Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, Amazon and Apple – marks the beginning of how the “Weed regime”, as WPP chief Sir Martin Sorrell calls it, will differ from how Unilever operated under previous CMO Simon Clift.

Weed says that the company’s digital marketing budget will double this year to put Unilever at the forefront of the digital world. It is this thinking that prompts Sorrell to describe Weed as “engaging, visionary…an ideal client”.

Another key project to support Unilever’s digital revolution is the partnership with film competition board Mofilm, which Weed announced in April. The deal marks a crowdsourcing drive to generate short commercial films for 13 Unilever brands.

The initiative is designed to attract up-and-coming filmmaking talent. Any content produced will be used in an attempt to create brand buzz and consumer engagement through viral videos.
Consumer desire for such engagement is there, Weed claims, revealing that within a week of the initiative being announced, more than 1,000 briefs were downloaded from would-be filmmakers keen to get involved.

“I know everybody has been talking about this digital revolution but I think it is bigger than even the most stretchy visions suggest,” he predicts. “I want to be able to leverage this fantastic revolution to create real engagement with the people who are buying our products, and allow them to help build our brands.”

Building consumer relationships goes beyond just making short films. The importance of entertaining and useful content is recognised by the company as an essential strategy to attract consumers to Unilever brands; part of a strategy embedded by Weed’s predecessor Clift.

“There is a thirst out there for entertainment and content. I don’t think people are happy to sit back and see the world pass in front of them anymore,” Weed claims. “If you look at five years ago, companies like ours would not have had such rich investments in content.” He points to the Flora brand, which is positioned as “the healthy alternative to butter and lard”, as a success story in this area. “We are sharing knowledge with consumers from the thousands of scientists we have working on cholesterol and heart issues.”

While Weed says working with Mofilm is reflective of how the ad world is moving towards content-driven marketing, he is also excited by technology itself. Unilever is one of the first advertisers to launch content on Apple’s new iAd platform.

The company is even investing in quirky technology, such as its ice cream vending machine that requests a user’s smile when they select an ice cream. The smile is then uploaded to Facebook as part of the transaction process in an attempt to share the emotions of buying an ice cream.

While Sorrell asked Weed during Cannes Lions what proportion of Unilever’s entire marketing budget – £4.8bn last year – would be devoted purely to digital this year, Weed would not divulge this commercial secret. He does say, however, that budget allocations will attempt to reflect consumer behaviour in individual markets.

“In the US, where people are spending 25% of their time in some form of digital engagement, then you would be looking at budgets in that order. We would be down to single figures in less developed markets.

“In terms of media choice, we will pick the balance that reflects the task. So it would be incorrect to suddenly put a huge percentage of money towards digital in markets where online use isn’t very developed.”

Weed believes his digital agenda goes hand in hand with his new communications remit, which he describes as a new way of “joined-up thinking”; where all communications, whether marketing or editorially-based, are driven by the same motivations of transparency and consumer benefit.

It is also why Weed believes the company’s sustainability strategy is best overseen by the marketing department (see Q&A, below). In an era of growing consumer expectations, scrutiny, and scepticism of “greenwashing”, joining up marketing and sustainability makes sense so that the overall strategy can be more efficiently communicated and developed, he claims.

Adding such dimensions to the CMO role naturally demands recognition in the boardroom. While Clift’s role before him was noteworthy for being the company’s first full-time CMO, Weed is fortunate in being able to boast he is the first marketer appointed to the Unilever board – a coup for marketers industry-wide, as they fight for more recognition in their organisations.

Weed claims the move reflects the consumer-centric approach that runs right through the company. “Unilever has some really good momentum right now and [chief executive] Paul Polman wants to see us building on that momentum with consumer demand-led growth.
“Being on the board is recognition of the importance of that,” he adds. “So when we come to making investment or strategic decisions, we can orientate that towards the person who is ultimately in charge – the consumer.”

Polman’s own appointment in January last year caused a stir after he became the first Unilever boss to come from “outside the company”. But Weed insists Polman has fitted in well, and his lengthy history with both Unilever rivals Procter & Gamble and Nestlé gives his role a healthy external angle.

Weed claims that Polman has given him a warm welcome to the boardroom and he has quickly learnt the value of having such an ally. “The great news for me is that Paul and I are very aligned in how we see business,” he announced in Cannes. “We have a similar mantra of being consumer centric and seeing the importance of consumer demand-led growth. The Unilever vision is to double our business without increasing our environmental footprint and the only way to achieve that is through consumer demand-led growth. Putting the consumer at the heart of everything we do will drive the business forward. Paul recognises that.”

Weed also made sure during his stay in Cannes to praise the work of his predecessor, possibly to distance himself from any notions of trouble in the marketing department before Clift’s departure: “As far as differences between me and Simon, let me declare my interest. Simon is a really good friend of mine and is the godfather of one of my children. He did a great job in setting up the marketing platform that I have now got. But of course there are still big challenges ahead.”

Those challenges aren’t just about navigating the complex world of digital channels. Being the new man in charge carries a certain pressure, he says. “We have some organisational work and new agenda work going on and what I’m seeing around me is a tremendous appetite for this change.”

“When you have a new leader, there are opportunities to reset the rhythms of a business. If you don’t take that first three or four months to set that new rhythm, then everyone will just settle back into the old one. I, as any new leader is, am interested in stepping up performance – where we are now is great but I want us to be even better.”

As for the successful completion of his first 100 days, Weed will not be one to dwell on the nostalgia of their passing. “My mission is to move quickly, set up the agenda now,” he states. “I’m a man in a hurry with a lot to do. The best thing to do in any race is start how you mean to go on.”

Written by MaryLou Costa

'We will see India engaging through mobile more than the US' (The Economic Times)

He’s the man in the hot seat, literally as well as figuratively. Literally, because the man injured his back the weekend before the Cannes Lions festival, restricting his movement. So the scheduled meeting with Keith Weed, the global chief marketing and communications officer, Unilever, almost fell through at the last minute until it was finally rescheduled with a slightly curtailed time slot allotted for the conversation. But once the talk began, the back pain was forgotten and it was the enormous responsibility that the man shoulders that became the focal point. Weed has recently taken on the all important marketing role at Unilever from Simon Clift. He comes in at a time when the marketplace is in a state of flux. Unilever may still be in the business of selling consumer goods, but the way to go about this has definitely changed.

A global ad spend of over $7 bn in 2009 makes Unilever the second largest advertiser in the world, after P&G. One of the immediate mandates for Weed is to bring a larger marketing focus at Unilever. And so far, Weed is pleased with the progress. “We have good momentum now. In the last quarter, we had 7 % volume growth. Compared to other consumer goods companies globally, that’s very competitive,” says Weed.

He adds that it’s not only the volume growth but also the volume share growth that the company keeps an eye on. “Volume growth means more people are buying our products and volume share means we are growing competitively with more consumers buying our products compared to competition.”

But while growth is relatively robust, an area that needs a much sharper focus at Unilever is digital. Weed says that he took a team of Unilever’s top managers: Category executive VPs from tea, laundry and haircare globally to Silicon Valley in May this year. “I went a day earlier and met venture capitalists like Sequoia Capital and Phoenix Ventures. Then the team came and we met players like Yahoo! and Google. These are players with whom we have a good working relationship,” he states. But what Unilever was looking at through such meetings is a step up, to acquire a true leading edge in the area of digital, says Weed. Engaging with companies at Silicon Valley, he says, “not only gave insights and the opportunities, but also a perspective on the massive shift that’s currently taking place.

And Weed is spending time with the agencies and partners whom he expects to also provide the digital edge in communications. Be it via ‘Share Happy’, a face recognition driven ice cream vending machine or the first ad on iPhone called iAd. Even as Unilever has a roster of agencies, including digital, the question is wouldn’t he want existing agencies to acquire the digital competence rather than have a separate outfit meeting the requirement? “Of course, at the end of the day, I would like our agencies to give us anything we need in the communication space,” he says. “And they will, because that’s their objective as well as ours.” He cites a recent example of one of Unilever’s core agency losing a pitch in the digital area for one of the brands. They were complaining about it, he says. “I told them, if you are mad, I am furious because you have made my life more difficult. Not only do I have to work with you, but now I have to handle the digital agency,” he says. “But we are clear that we want the best and we will work with the best as we have high standards,” he adds. Weed says that he’s driving the business to even higher levels of excellence and if it means working with different agencies, traditional or digital, so be it.

But the expectation from agencies comes as Unilever recently undertook a crowd sourcing experiment. So are agencies in the line of fire with such an initiative? No, says Weed. “We are in the midst of a digital revolution and I see it much bigger than what we perceive it to be,” he states. So when it comes to paid, earned and owned media, Weed says Unilever has a lot of experience. Even in owned media, with unilever.com and axe.com, he says the company has acquired a lot of content through years of research. In the earned media space, particularly in the social media space, consumers are interested in engaging and one way of engaging is getting them to contribute. “So crowd sourcing allows engagement and also gives us access to a whole lot of content,” he says. He adds that some tests have been done based on the content that has emerged on the Surf Excel brand in India and the quality and creativity of the films is impressive. “I don’t see it as a threat or an alternative to agencies. I see it as a source of enriching the agencies, a new way to engage with consumers and a new way to market.”

And innovation targeted at consumers is of critical importance for Weed and Unilever. He says Lord Leverhulme in 1800s may have used phrases like ‘making cleanliness common place’ or ‘to lessen the burden of women’ and they may sound old fashioned but have relevance even today. Weed talks about an innovation in India that Unilever is bringing in for Rin that highlights visible whiteness. “Of course, what’s behind it is great amount of science and patents that we have defended in courts against competition and pushed competitors away. These innovations give us the advantage over competition.”

Weed says markets like India and China are not developing markets but fast-growing dynamic markets. And one needs to segment markets like India and China to understand the opportunities. “India has 500 million mobile users. Right now, globally there 1.4 bn people using the net and 4 billion mobile phones globally, half a billion from India. So clearly, the next billon online users will come from the mobile markets.” So there are real opportunities of using digital in emerging markets, he says. “While we might not have high internet penetration in India compared to the US, where 25% of media time is spent online, mobile will unlock that. We will see India engaging through mobile more than the US,” he adds. Rest assured Weed will ensure Unilever is ready to ride the wave.

Written by Rajiv Banerjee, ET Bureau