Unilever is three months into a major structural reorganization and still early in a years-long plan to reshape its company around new marketing and distribution channels.
It’s Aaron Sobol’s job to help lead that charge on the media front.
Sobol is Unilever’s head of media investment and partnerships. He joined the CPG giant last year after more than a decade on the agency side, most recently as managing partner and group director at Mindshare.
The brand perspective on media and its role in a lot different than the agency point of view, Sobol said on stage at the IAB’s Brand Disruption Summit in New York City earlier this week.
“When you enter those [agency] doors, you are you coming into an office of all media professionals – media planning, media strategy, custom content makers, research – where everybody eats, sleeps and breathes media,” he said.
On the brand side, however, the in-house media team is comparatively small and sits “inside of a relatively small marketing community, inside of a very, very large company.”
Which means that Sobol’s remit at Unilever (prioritizing “media investment and partnerships”) is taking on new shape even as we speak.
Consumer-packaged innovation
For example, Unilever is committed to investing in innovation across its media plan this year.
According to Sobol, it’s ideal to carve out a small share of overall spend to reserve for new channels and “unknowns,” which is what people often mean when they talk about an “innovation budget.”
But the same test-and-learn goals of an innovation budget should be “deeply injected” into the whole media plan, Sobol said.
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“When we look back at the year in review,” he said, “it should look very different than the year before.”
And then there’s the whole budding category of retail media, which has quickly blown through the “innovation budget” phase and earned a spot on the media plan for many going forward.
Retail media networks are part of larger trend toward first-party data media platforms (as in, retailers themselves following in the footsteps of Amazon and Google) and also of brand marketers trying to transition from attribution based on weak proxy metrics, such as linear television ratings and online ad metrics like clicks and reach, to actual business results.
The main appeal of retail media is closed-loop attribution based on sales, Sobol said. But although Unilever is an early partner for practically every retailer ad network out there, it considers retail media to be a “less mature space.”
Unilever’s account teams at Amazon and Google may earnestly care about what Sobol has to say. But, let’s be real, Amazon and Google aren’t taking Unilever’s thoughts into account as they finetune their ad platform products and policies.
The majority of the retailer-owned ad platform businesses, however, have launched in the past five years, Sobol said, and so there’s time and room to work and grow together, including on band needs, like third-party independent verification.
“They’re very open-minded to it,” he said.
On the flip side, though, it can feel practically impossible to change age-old business practices in retail, TV and CPG. A bit like planting a piece of petrified wood and expecting a new tree to grow.
But Sobol said marketers and agencies can and have affected broad change when they hold the line on something that matters to them.
For instance, it was only six or seven years ago that the TV upfronts seemed unchangeably set in stone – until brands and agencies forced digital media and buying standards into upfront packages, starting with YouTube and then other online channels.
Once the new data-driven offerings existed, it was a “no-brainer” for everyone to lean in further, Sobol said – although it wasn’t easy.
“It took a lot of work to say, ‘Enough is enough, stop paying more for less and move with the times,’” he said.
