Inside Unilever's Reorganization: Media Mix Modeling and Cross-Disciplinary Marketing Hubs

Most consumers are at least familiar with its haircare brands including Dove, TRESemmé, and Love Beauty and Planet. But name recognition alone doesn’t necessarily push more products. For Unilever marketers keen on expanding sales, the task is tough: convert shoppers who use competing products into new customers.

Expanding market share for the haircare lines was already a priority when external factors disrupted how the entire CPG category did business as usual. The pandemic skyrocketed ecommerce sales, and brands that relied on in-person shopping watched stores shut down and sales dry up. Marketers industrywide honed in on digital strategy for a time. Then, stores reopened and marketers had to pivot yet again as consumers preferred a more balanced mix of in-person and online shopping than they had before 2020.

Marketers Must Balance Media Mix to Collapse Brand and Performance Silos

“There really has been a huge evolution over the past few years in consumer behavior. How [do] people purchase? It’s not strictly in-store anymore, nor strictly ecommerce,” Aaron Sobol, head of U.S. media investments and partnerships at Unilever, told Adweek.

In 2022, fresh off a global media agency review process in which it retained GroupM’s Mindshare as its lead media partner, Unilever partnered with Mindshare to revamp both its approach to data and measurement, as it also restructured its marketing department.

“Generally, across the Unilever portfolio, it means that we need to be able to show up differently, show up in ways that are more personalized and find new ways to become unmissable for our consumers,” said Sobol.

Finding (and closing) measurement gaps

The leader cares about ecommerce sales outcomes—not just traditional media KPIs, which don’t always show the whole picture. Generally speaking, a Super Bowl spot increases brand awareness, a digital banner ad gleans impressions, and a social media campaign propels quick online transactions. But, if those campaigns aren’t seamlessly working together to meet a single overarching sales goal, it’s tough to say how valuable they are.

That was the problem at Unilever last year. Before July 2022, Unilever’s centralized media team operated alongside other centralized practices focused on measurement or commerce. Siloed teams made it tough for any single marketer to understand where their work fit into the customer journey and what investments were actually worthwhile.

This model has opened up many opportunities to make large and small shifts.

Aaron Sobol, head of U.S. media investments, Unilever

Compounding the organizational challenges, it wasn’t uncommon for Unilever to wait as long as a year to receive sales data from its ecosystem partners. Attribution issues plague CPG companies especially, considering they may wait months to receive sales data from hundreds of grocery stores. The sheer number of players involved, plus variances in data collection practices and policies, makes real-time performance monitoring nearly impossible.

“In a world that is more performance-minded, the reality is that we can’t wait for such delays,” Sobol said. Receiving insights quickly is necessary, even for things like turning off media investment for products that sell out online.

As Supply Chain Woes Persist, Retail and Media Collide

Mindshare and Unilever looked for measurement gaps––any instance where planners couldn’t correlate media spend with sales outcomes.

“We needed to develop a model that responds quicker to the marketplace and allows us to optimize much more frequently,” Sobol said.

The partners determined they needed a sophisticated media mix modeling tool (MMM). The brand tapped an MMM vendor to build a new model based on Unilever’s historical performance data. It predicts how the team’s real-time media investments are likely to impact sales, guiding strategy.

Then, retail media accelerated. It was good timing, allowing Sobol’s team to see how retail media investments directly correlated with online sales outcomes across specific retailers.

Restructuring the marketing org

Finding the measurement gaps meant tweaking Unilever’s marketing organizational structure and workflows so marketers across disciplines could interact more easily.

Each needed to understand how their work impacted the bottom line, so Unilever overhauled its organizational structure and created five interdisciplinary marketing hubs.

Within the revamped team, the brand assigned marketing leaders to each of its five business units: personal care; beauty and well being; nutrition; ice cream; and home care. This allowed team leaders “to really dive deep and be fully accountable to [their] category,” Sobol said. They’re responsible for understanding how every marketing investment draws them nearer to a desired outcome.

To stop new silos from developing, leaders across all five categories collaborate and learn from each other. This works especially well when leaders in a single category realize how sister brands succeed and implement similar strategies. Learning from each other creates “efficiencies and efficacies that help us learn quicker and deliver,” Sobol said. 

Creating a new organizational model to support new ways of working wound up paying off. Retail media investments in particular shifted outcomes: On its launch day, one retail media campaign drove a 71% return for Unilever.

“This model has opened up many opportunities to make large and small shifts. And we can make those shifts relatively quickly with this new setup,” Sobol said. 

Mindshare mirrored Unilever’s new structure

In a move that’s becoming increasingly common for media agency teams, Mindshare employees found themselves at the same table as Unilever’s data and media teams. They all focus on which target audiences respond to certain advertising initiatives, and then draw conclusions about what works. This interconnectedness reveals which creative messaging or media channels resonate most with audiences. 

“When we say performance, it’s not simply performance media in the general sense of search and display media,” Sobol told Adweek. “We expect all media to deliver results based on specific KPIs.”

As Mindshare co-developed the new media model for Unilever, it also reorganized its own team to match theirs. “We have evolved to ensure that we have all the key people, but essentially we have performance sitting at the core,” said Dan Eckrote, a managing director at Mindshare.

Unilever Is Gearing Up for a Serious Retail Media Boom

Unilever called the new working structure the Compass Organization. It took three months to roll out the changes, but now Unilever’s brand marketers, digital performance and ecommerce teams make decisions as a collective. The Compass Organization “allows us to continually assess our media model to ensure that we are responding to these evolving consumer needs,” Sobol said.

Separate from its Unilever service model, Mindshare was already building its skillset in lower-funnel marketing. Early last year it finalized an integration with performance media agency Neo, a move that broadened its lower-funnel capabilities and ostensibly made it a more attractive partner for sales-focused brands.

In 2022, the emphasis on full-funnel capabilities won it the Discover account.