Unilever CMO defends controversial Marmite, Lynx and Pot Noodle ads (Marketing Week, Lara O'Reilly)

DMEXCO: Unilever’s chief marketing and communications officer Keith Weed has defended his company’s recent run of ads that have drawn complaints from viewers, saying while the brands are genuinely sorry for any offense caused, “we won’t please all people all the time”.

Recent controversial campaigns include a Pot Noodle ad the advertising regulator classed “crass and degrading” , Lynx campaigns that have been accused of “promoting racial stereotypes” and “objectifying women” and a Marmite TV campaign that racked up 504 complaints.
Speaking to Marketing Week at the Dmexco conference in Cologne, Weed disagreed the company produces “controversial” ads.

He said: “We are a very broad base consumer goods business, hence we advertise to lots of people and within that, we won’t please all people all the time.''

“Having said that, if we ever do cause any offense we take that seriously and are genuinely sorry.”
He pointed out in the “End Marmite Neglect” example - which was cleared by the Advertising Standards Authority in spite of the high complaint numbers - many people “loved” the ad because it fitted with its “You either love it or hate it” tagline and that it did not draw any complaints from charities like the RSPCA.

On Lynx, which has often had ads banned by the regulator over the years, Weed said the company has to make stand-out campaigns for its target audience to achieve cut through.

He added: “Lynx is about giving confidence to young guys in a very challenging part of their lives, that isn’t a bad thing. How do you engage? If you did it in a boring way, they wouldn’t notice
“And who buys Lynx? Mum buys Lynx…I guarantee Mum would not buy Lynx if she was embarrassed to see it in her in shopping trolley.”

“[The marketing is] slightly tongue in cheek and slightly hyberbole. We don’t intend to offend people but [some of these campaigns] are appropriate for our brands, target audience and bring a level of enjoyment, a smile and humour to people’s lives”.

Weed was speaking to Marketing Week shortly after he gave his keynote at the conference. Entitled “Yours Digitally”, his presentation outlined the three pillars behind Unilever’s “crafting brands for life” strategy: putting people first, building brand love and “unlocking the magic”.

He cited brand case studies including Dove’s “Real Beauty” ad, which achieved 3.8 billion global impressions, becoming the most watched online ad in history, Cornetto’s “Cupidity” campaign and the current Lynx’s Apollo Space Academy activity.

Weed told Marketing Week such stand-out marketing and Unilever’s point of difference, its “Sustainable Living Plan”, have seen Unilever become the second most searched-for brand for marketing careers behind Google on LinkedIn.

“It’s not Facebook, it’s not Microsoft, it’s Unilever. I think it’s because we’re about a different business model, serving customers in a different and sustainable way,” he added.

Dmexco 2013: Unilever’s Keith Weed Calls For Magic And Logic From Digital Marketing (CMO.com, Michael Nutley)

Marketing is a mixture of magic and logic, and digital marketing can deliver both.

That was the key message in the opening keynote of the 2013 Dmexco show, given by Unilever CMCO Keith Weed.

“I don’t have a particular love for digital,” Weed said, “but I love what it can do.”

He went on to say that his ambition was to have people know and love Unilever for what they do in digital and mobile the way they currently do in TV.

He outlined how Unilever’s strategy, “Crafting brands for life” is applied online across its three pillars; Putting People First, Building Brand Love and Unlocking The Magic.

“Putting people first is about how people live and how we engage with them. For example, Dove stands for real beauty and real care. Digital allowed us to create a movement. Dove Sketches is the fourth most shared ad ever. That’s the magic; imagine trying to engage that many people on TV or in print. The logic is that it has had 170m views and is the most watched online ad of all time.

“Building brand love - you need a great product for people to buy, but you also need a great idea for them to buy into. Lifebuoy is a disinfectant soap and it’s a big brand in Africa and Asia. We’ve taught 30m people to wash their hands because one of the best things you can do to improve health is washing your hands properly.”

Weed gave two examples of unlocking the magic. The first was the Cupidity campaign for ice cream brand Cornetto, which featured four short films about teenage love. The second was the Axe Apollo Space Academy campaign, which Weed described as bringing magic and logic together. The campaign will end with 22 young men being sent up into space.

“A campaign like this is only possible if you can achieve reach and leverage the huge investment,” he said.

D&AD - The White Pencil: Panel Session on Sustainability

Launched to reward creativity for social good, the D&AD White Pencil has inspired a bigger conversation.  One that articulates the ambitions of a new generation of design and advertising talent: creativity for social change - purpose beyond profit.

Watch the panel session here.

Brand Equity : Chats With Keith Weed (Part two - YouTube video)

View part two of the interview with Brand Equity here

Brand Equity: In Conversation with Keith Weed (YouTube video)

View Keith Weed's conversation on the importance of sustainability, responsible capitalism and mobile as an enabler in today's world. View the video here

Unilever marketing chief Keith Weed warns brands must become a 'force for good' (Marketing, By Alex Brownsell)

 

Unilever's top marketer Keith Weed has called on brands to respond to social unrest around the world by "re-thinking" their business models and becoming a "force for good".

 

In the wake of mass public protests in countries such as Turkey, Brazil and Egypt, Unilever’s chief marketing and communications told an audience at ISBA’s annual lunch in London today (2 July) that businesses must change their practises if their brands are to get off the "back foot".

The marketer said that Unilever is moving from a mind-set of "social responsibility" to one of "social accountability", and that businesses have no option but to build their operations around a sustainable premise.

People have stopped asking, ‘who is in charge?’ and they are taking matters into their own hands.

Weed said: "We are in the grip of political and economic uncertainty. Unemployment is high, geo-political tensions are high, and at the same time the growth we are all going for is coming at an enormous cost to our planet," he said.
"We face these issues at a time when trust in our institutions and businesses is at an historic low, with daily scandals, whether it be around oil leaks, horse meat or fixing the inter-bank lending rate.

"The result is that people have stopped asking, ‘who is in charge?’ and they are taking matters into their own hands, aided by the escalation of social media. Companies such as ours are thinking about the kinds of practical solutions we could offer," said Weed.

Negative message

Referring to Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan, in which the FMCG giant has set itself a number of targets to reach to 2020, Weed criticised those who view sustainability as a purely negative message.

"Too much of the debate right now is all about what you can’t do – it’s prescriptive, you should consume less, etcetera. But there are lots of things you can do, and it’s about promoting how we can consume differently," he said.

"I think brands have a really big role in all of this: brands can be a force for change and for good. If we bring movements for social change around our brands, then we can connect with this challenge."

Weed ended his speech by arguing that the business world is "at a crossroads" and the time has come for marketers to devise a new approach.

"Today’s adult generation has stolen from our children’s future financially, with the credit crunch and beyond, and we’ve also stolen from our children’s future environmentally.

Together, I believe we can make things better for consumers and grow our businesses at the same time."

Q&A: Unilever CMO Keith Weed (Marketing Week, by Rosie Baker)

Unilever global CMO Keith Weed talks about humanising digital marketing, experimentation and the technologies that are exciting him.

Marketing Week (MW): Is the pace of change facing the marketing industry exciting or scary for marketers?

Keith Weed: Things have changed so much in the last 10 years, the last five years, and the last three years. What’s happening is the twin peaks of the growth of globalisation and the growth of technology, they are feeding off each other. The more global you can become the more digital you can become and vice versa. It’s scary if you’re caught in the middle. If you’re niche it’s OK and if you’ve got scale it’s OK. So with a €6bn budget if I can’t be experimenting and testing the future then shame on me. But you can’t do that if you’re medium sized.

MW: Google says brands need to put experimentation [in marketing] at the forefront, not as a side project. What do you think?

KW: What you need to do is remember what we’re [Unilever] doing. At the end of the day we are serving consumers and building brands. If you remember those two things it guides you through what is a challenging time for marketers. Just because you can do everything, doesn’t mean you should. I think being choosey is becoming a bigger part of what a marketer has to do.

The first thing I’d say [about experimentation] is fish where the fish are. There are a lot of interesting things you can do and of course you do need to experiment but you should look where consumers are engaging with brands and consuming media. In the US – if you look broadly at digital - people are spending about 30 per cent of their time in that area. So it’s not surprising a lot of US companies are spending about 30 per cent of their budget there. If you look across the world you see a huge difference. Based on infrastructure, penetration of internet or mobile or various reasons. In India you wouldn’t want to spend a fortune on internet where there is low penetration.

To this day the biggest and most powerful way to engage with people is TV advertising and it will remain so for the foreseeable future. However, it’s not the only way. We’ll see more and more campaigns that leverage many levers like social and mobile and video and that’s endlessly exciting. There are options [for experimentation] but they are not compulsory.

MW: There has also been a lot of conversation at Cannes this year about ‘humanising’ digital marketing. Do you think the way a lot of brands still approach integrates and digital is still a bit cold and not quite fitting with consumer behaviour?

KW: It’s a very good point and we talk about humanisation a lot internally. We talk about real people with real lives. We use the term ‘consumer’ less and less because it puts a label or a badge on people who are actually you, your mum, your sister, and your friend. We need to think about how people use social etc. to connect and engage with other people because in the same way they are engaging with people they are also engaging with brands. The conversation needs to be much more human than in can be an announcement style TV broadcast. We’ve learned that TV is giving you information but it isn’t the way you chat to your friend and it certainly isn’t the way you should talk to brands. People are real people – they are not heads of hair charging around looking for shampoo solutions, or a pair of armpits looking to be deodorised.

MW: What technology development excites you?

KW: There are two things really. The first is mobile and I know that everyone talks about mobile but the truth of the matter is it is barely leveraged. It will have as big an impact on marketers as the internet had. I was at CES in Las Vegas this year and at Mobile World Congress and while there are lots of brands at CES there are fewer at MWC so it hasn’t really got in people’s minds yet.

When I was a young marketer, I remember being jealous of retailers for having a direct interface with consumers, but now with mobile we [FMCG brands] can have that too. I think mobile is the most important thing because it’s about direct connection.

The other is an enabler for marketers - all the technology that enables marketers to really view and feed digital campaigns. The Dove Sketches campaign has just become the most viewed branded film ever with 145 million views around the world. We have a control room in the office where we monitor it all – it’s like air traffic control with screens and Twitter feeds from around the world. The views grew naturally but watching the data we could really dial up certain things as we learnt from each country. It’s the science of marketing.

MW: Dove and Lynx brand marketing is always held up by other brands as an example of great marketing but what brands in Unilever’s portfolio are more challenging and where you still have to find the big idea?

KW: We have 14 €1bn brands. We want that to be 20, then 30. In an increasingly joined up world the opportunity to have a bigger, more cohesive brand is there but also it’s more challenging. As always, you need to have big ideas but increasingly you need brands with a certain level of purpose and depth. If I take Ono/Persil Dirt is Good campaign as an example, I could be telling you Persil washes whiter – indeed it does, it’s a great product and a great brand but the fact that we go further to engage on the experience between families and the experience of going out and getting dirty under the Dirt is Good banner means we can go on to talk about child development and have a much deeper relationship [with the consumer]. [Unilever runs advice and research programmes to encourage active development and outdoor play.]

[As a brand] if you’re just talking about one product benefit you’re a bit like a person at a party telling the same joke over again. To start with people stand around and listen but by the end of the evening everyone will have gravitated away. Brands haven’t got that still. You’d think they would have but there are still a lot of brands telling the same thing over and over again. Repetition is good but if you go too far it becomes boredom and in the social world people don’t have to listen - they walk away. If you want to engage people you have to be engaging and brands with a bit more depth do better.

MW: What are the biggest challenges in the UK specifically and have they changed over the past year?

KW: Our biggest opportunity is also our biggest challenge and in the UK it’s mobile.

There is a significant penetration of smartphones and 3G in the UK which means you can get really good quality engagement through mobile. The biggest challenge is to unlock the mobile opportunity – we are in the foothills of mobile.

Three years ago I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time taking our senior marketers around Silicon Valley to meet the big digital firms like Google. We had a fleeting meeting with an upcoming company called Twitter and we happened to drop in to see Apple when it was developing iAd. It is to this day by far the best mobile smartphone ad platform that there is. Eighty per cent of success is showing up, they say, and I showed up and sealed the deal on the day. We’re still the largest advertiser on the platform. A lot of people have challenged it as to whether it’s a good part of the overall mix as it’s seen as expensive, but to me its value rather than expense. Consumers are spending over a minute in an iAd with Unilever products.

That’s exactly why you should experiment. We are proud of being first – we had the first black and white TV ad, first colour TV ad in the UK, and the first iAd.