How Unilever is Reinventing Product Marketing with AI

Unilever’s Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Esi Egglestone Bracey, has revealed how the brand is transforming product marketing and brand experience by using AI and digital twins.

Speaking at Nvidia’s GTC 2025 conference, Esi explained how the company is using AI-driven technologies like Nvidia’ Omniverse to create digital twins of its products, significantly speeding up content creation.

“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,” she explained.

Unilever says that, as a result of this approach, product imagery is created twice as fast and more cost-effectively, leading to greater brand consistency for customers.

Accelerating content creation

Digital transformation means consumers are faced with an ever-growing number of touchpoints, channels and mediums defining what they buy, and how they buy it.

This can be particularly challenging for brands, even those at the scale of global leaders like Unilever.

In this environment, they face navigating more ways to capture attention across media, social, retail and search platforms, making each moment with a potential customer crucial for brand engagement and sales conversion. 

For Unilever, one of the world’s largest consumer goods brands driving sustainable living for 3.4 billion people using its products in 190 countries, this is a significant challenge. 

This is why the company’s GAP 2030 strategy – a strategic plan for driving competitiveness and market making across superior brands – focuses on transformative marketing to unlock opportunities. 

Technology plays a crucial role in this for Unilever, which uses it to enhance human creativity to optimise relevant and personalised content. This frees time for the company’s marketing professionals to focus on creative and innovative product and content development. 

“This isn't about pushing out more content – anyone can do that,” says Esi.

“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.”

Creating digital twins for global brands

Product images are essential for brand identity and equity. 

With this in mind, Unilever is using AI-powered technologies to create real-time, physically accurate 3D digital twins of its products. 

Each digital twin contains all its variants, labels, packaging and language formats within a single file, enabling one single digital truth of all product data. They also reflect every measurement, shade and shape of their real-life counterparts. 

The company’s creative teams integrate these images into AI-enhanced workflows, reducing duplication and enabling their use across platforms from TV to digital commerce at unprecedented speeds. 

This approach reduces content creation and delivery times, cuts the energy associated with lengthy technical production processes and improves efficiency. 

According to Unilever, by adopting this 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. 

Esi adds: “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.”

AI driving business growth

Adopting digital twins enables Unilever to streamline production and marketing processes, while also boosting desirability and bringing products to market faster than ever before. 

The company’s beauty and wellbeing brands have been pioneering the approach, and are integrating digital twins across product lines for TRESemmé, Dove, Vaseline and Clear.

Marketing insights from this rollout show higher engagement with the digital twin images holding user attention for three times longer than previous assets and doubling click-through rates. 

“Our digital twins do not work in isolation. We have created bespoke tools at Unilever to integrate them into our content ecosystem,” says Esi.

This is part of a wider adoption and scaling programme for AI at Unilever. The brand currently has more than 500 AI applications across its business, including for product R&D, marketing, supply chain optimisation, innovation and customer engagement. 

Explore the latest edition of AI Magazine and be part of the conversation at our global conference series, Tech & AI LIVE. 

Discover all our upcoming events and secure your tickets today.

AI Magazine is a BizClik brand