Opinion: CMO World Tour interview with Unilever's Keith Weed

There is, says Unilever’s marketing boss, a lost generation. It’s made up of marketers who left school before the arrival of digital and are still waiting for their children to grow up and induct them into IM, Facebook and the rest of the social media jungle.

They need to accept the fact that they are missing out, and accept that “ultimately we all need to be digital natives,” he says.

“It’s like being caught out suddenly with everyone going to use cars and you’re still on a horse, I mean it’s going to work for a very short period of time,” he says. “If I wasn’t iChatting with my 20-year-old at university he wouldn’t be talking to me. If I wasn’t texting and sending photographs back and forth with my daughter I wouldn’t have a relationship.”

Weed says the challenge for CMOs in the digital age is to constantly be at the cutting edge.

“You could say that it is easy for the second-largest advertiser in the world, we have big budgets and if we can’t do it shame on us,” he says pointing out that while smaller companies will always be nimble, medium-sized brands may struggle to be competitive against those like Unilever that have the firepower and start ups with greater energy.

His own personal digital consumption is powered by his Blackberry (for inputting and the fact that it doesn’t drop calls in the UK) and an iPhone. An iPad has replaced a laptop for his travels but at home there is a laptop in every room.

Weed admits to being a lurker on Twitter, which he uses to research important news stories, but keeps Facebook for his friends and LinkedIn for work, mostly to allow people to get in touch with him.

He also acknowledges the importance of social commerce, recently changing his choice of leaf blower purchase after reading reviews on Amazon pointing out problems with the strap.

“What struck me is the importance nowadays of having great products that can be peer reviewed. You can have great advertising but if you don’t have great products you can't have someone out there sharing their personal experiences. It has put a much greater emphasis on product quality and, in fact, product superiority in our overall marketing mix,” he says.

Frédéric Colas: How has your personal digital life impacted your vision of marketing?

Keith Weed: One of the things I say to all my team is you’ve really got to live the space. It’s a term I’ve stolen off Babs [Rangaiah], who heads digital for us here in Unilever and it is so true. I mean could you imagine someone who would only ever listen to the radio coming up with fantastic TV commercials, if you hadn’t seen TV, engaged with TV I think it would be very hard to come up with great TV commercials.

I expect all marketers in Unilever to be living the space, engage and if you are going to be a great [marketer] you need to be a great digital [marketer]. So that would be the first thing I would say is just get a feel.

FC: What is the likely impact of mobile on Unilever’s marketing strategy?

KW: We are a mass-market consumer goods business, everyday two billion people use our products so this is massive - a third of the planet is using our products. But actually this is made up of single decisions and single purchases and the great thing about a mobile device is it's a very personal thing.

So first you are engaging with people where they are at that moment, their lifestyles. So, for example, young people now use mobiles rather than watches to tell the time and certainly to wake themselves up.

…going beyond that, of course, then everything has to be about specifics, can you imagine now you are in Central Park and it’s a sunny day, because of the mobile device we know it is a sunny day, we know you are in Central Park and we can now send you an offer to say there’s a new ice cream just being launched called Magnum — why don’t you go and try one?

By the way here are the three nearest stores, and by the way here is a coupon you can use to try a Magnum. That sort of marketing that one-to-one marketing is only just around the corner.

FC: How does digital change the job of the CMO?

KW: The fundamentals will remain the same as far as people buy brands. They buy brand experiences, they enjoy products and services and they repeat purchases based on the enjoyment of that product and service. That will always remain the same, so no matter how we engage people you can’t get people to repeatedly use a product that isn’t any good and you can’t get people to develop a relationship with a brand they don’t like. I think what’s different is the way we engage people, and certainly we have had a mass approach to engagement of people with TV.

TV still remains incredibly important, but I think we will see TV coming down and a more personalised engagement on a one-to-one basis, which of course is not only because the devices enable you to do it, (but) the data behind that gives all [marketers] the opportunity to understand better what their particular consumer wants, likes, and is interested in, and hence has a better chance of engaging with them.

I think that is the exciting part and that is going to change and change the whole social graph and right now lots of people are collecting lots of data, we don’t have the power yet to unlock that, but we will.

FC: How does digital change your vision of marketing in two key words?

KW: For me it would be “connectivesness” and “always-on”. I think this connectiveness with an individual, the ability to interact with the people directly rather than via a TV screen or indeed, of course, via a retailer. It's not like data used to be through just the retailer; now we have a direct connection.

"Always-on" creates an opportunity but a massive challenge for a company like ours. We have a well-honed system to spend several hundreds of thousands of dollars creating a 30-second TV ad.

You cannot do that and be always-on. So as I’ve said to my team the challenge is to have always-on, quality content that’s cost effective and right now you can have two of the three, but you can’t have three of the three. I want two of the three, I’ll get three of the three but we’ve got some work to do before we get there.

FC: How does Unilever hope to achieve always-on quality content that’s cost effective?

KW: We have been connecting directly with a lot of the content providers so I’ve been out with the Viacoms, the News Corps and the MTVs, the top studios and broadcasters, because the digital evolution is even more profound for them than it is for us.

But the big way it’s really profound is their distribution model. We can be part of the distribution model. We have a model, which I know many people do, of the paid, owned and earned media spaces.

'Earned' is an exciting area around social pages, we all know it’s the good old TV but we also put in search etc.

But in the 'owned' I think with some good content we can have a much more dynamic place in engaging consumers beyond just communication messages into content and that way I think we can get some interesting partnerships.

FC: How is your marketing structure adapting to digital?

KW: We have a marketing structure that has brand development – people who build the equity and innovation on a cross country, regional, global basis and then we have what we call brand builders, who are marketers and much more focused on local markets.

What we have been doing is moving the role of digital asset creation more away from the local [marketers] to the cross country, regional, global [marketers] and for obvious reasons. It’s a very global medium and you can see a particular digital campaign in different markets. And you've got to make sure that’s it’s appropriate — and what’s appropriate to a Spanish speaker in Latin America might be very different to a Spanish speaker in North America, but both have visibility.

…On the other side, it’s the whole engagement on a community basis and the local [marketers] need to be resourced and have the ability to engage with consumers on a very local basis.

So in one way we’re going more global and creating structures, making sure the IT platforms are robust whether be it from data protection through to functionality, which you don’t do so much if you’re doing it with a local agency in a local market.

But then on the other side we’re pushing the local marketers to get closer to their communities, being community managers, engaging with their consumers, ensuring that the presence of their brand in their particular market, whether it be across YouTube, whether it’s a combination of natural and bought search across to what people are talking about in Facebook, all adds up and makes sense.

FC: On what challenges would you like to get the advice from your peers at the World Federation of Advertisers?

KW: To me the two challenges are: How do you create always-on cost effective quality content and really understanding how to [do] community management. You could end up putting a lot of resource talking on a one to one basis with a lot of people in a very ineffective way and we’re still working on that as I’m sure many others are.

For additional content from this conversation visit cmoworldtour.com and wfanet.org, where you can also propose questions for future guests and find other CMO World Tour content.