Speaking at the Venice Festival of Media, Unilever’s senior vice-president for global media, Laura Klauberg (pictured), said internal resistance to new media had been strong, despite high-profile online success for Unilever men’s brand AXE, and later with Dove.
“We would often hear the excuse ‘Oh, that’s AXE, that’s really not going to work on my campaign’,” she said.
MySpace has more than 110 million monthly active users and Facebook has more than 70 million worldwide, yet executives within marketing departments have remained unconvinced they should start trying to reach consumers here.
Facebook chief revenue officer Mike Murphy said this fear of the unknown was, until very recently, widespread.
“One company said to us: ‘We’ve decided to sit this one out’. This isn’t a space brands can decide to sit out of.”
Klauberg said a change of attitude was necessary - difficult though it was.
“How could we, as one of the world’s biggest global advertisers, continue as if it’s business as usual? Media and creative could not continue to live in separate silos and we couldn’t continue to produce 30-second ads.”
She said Unilever benefited from the presence of internal ‘evangelists’. Culture was fostered to encourage digital work with the understanding that not every piece of work would be a hit.
“We knew we would make mistakes, and we didn’t penalise anyone for not hitting a home run first time up to bat,” Klauberg said.
Now, Unilever has a dozen brands using video-on-demand.
At Coca-Cola, SVP of creative excellence Pio Schunker said the company’s first real step into the unknown came just last year, via an integrated campaign for the US launch of Coke Zero, in which digital media played a key role.
