Nila Kartika Wati
By Kimeko McCoy | July 10, 2026
The advertising industry has reached a tipping point. For years, creator marketing—the practice of partnering with influencers to build brand affinity—was a boutique, high-touch operation. Today, it has transformed into a massive, data-driven industrial complex. As global conglomerates scramble to scale their creator rosters from dozens to hundreds of thousands, they are hitting a bottleneck: the human capacity to manage the administrative chaos that comes with such growth.
Unilever, a titan of the consumer goods sector, is leading the charge in this transition. Following its bold 2025 declaration to make creators a cornerstone of its marketing strategy, the company has scaled its program from a modest 10,000 creators to a staggering 300,000. This shift is forcing a fundamental rethink of how global brands operate, with Unilever betting that the solution to "creator bloat" lies in the strategic deployment of artificial intelligence and automated systems.
The Operational Headache of Global Scale
For the modern marketer, the challenges of working with creators are no longer about finding "the right vibe." They are about the logistical nightmare of discovery, vetting, contract management, content approval, and performance tracking. When scaling to 300,000 partners across 190 countries, the traditional manual approach—the "Excel sheet era"—collapses under its own weight.
Leandro Barreto, chief marketing officer for Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing business group, addressed this reality during a roundtable at the 2026 Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. He noted that the industry is "hellbent" on scaling, but warned that the infrastructure must match the ambition.
"In most of the places where we are using technology, technology is used for us to augment the human choices," Barreto explained. "This doesn’t need to be done by a person in an Excel sheet. This can be done by a system that scans the internet to identify authentic advocates."
Chronology of a Transformation
The evolution of Unilever’s creator strategy has moved at a breakneck pace:
- 2024: Unilever begins testing small-scale, platform-specific creator partnerships, relying heavily on traditional agency talent managers to facilitate relationships.
- 2025: The "Year of the Creator." Unilever announces a massive shift in its media mix, declaring that influencer marketing will no longer be a side experiment but a core pillar of its global marketing spend.
- Early 2026: The company faces the "scaling wall." Internal teams report that managing the manual workflows for thousands of creators is delaying campaign launches and increasing administrative costs.
- Mid-2026: Unilever implements proprietary and third-party AI agents to automate the vetting of creators, brand safety scanning, and content auditing.
- Current Status: The company is now actively managing 300,000 creator relationships, utilizing automated systems to handle the "grunt work" while retaining human oversight for strategic creative decisions.
Supporting Data: The Influencer Marketing Surge
The urgency behind Unilever’s automation drive is mirrored by broader market trends. According to eMarketer’s latest forecasts, spending on influencer marketing in the United States is projected to grow by 15.7% this year alone, with total expenditures expected to reach $13.7 billion by 2027.
The sheer volume of partnerships is also skyrocketing. Jennifer Quigley-Jones, vp of strategy and partnerships at PMG, notes that the "average" campaign has fundamentally changed. "A few years ago, a standard campaign might have involved five to eight creators," Quigley-Jones said. "Today, brands are routinely asking for 25 to 30 creators for the exact same scope of work."
This expansion necessitates a shift from artisanal management to programmatic management. When a campaign requires the oversight of dozens of creators simultaneously, the risk of human error in documentation, briefing, and brand safety compliance becomes a liability that only automated systems can reliably mitigate.
Automating the Grunt Work
The "grunt work" that Barreto and his peers are offloading to AI typically falls into three categories:
- Discovery: AI agents scan social media platforms in real-time, identifying creators who are already discussing Unilever products or who align with the company’s brand values. This replaces the slow process of agency-led talent scouting.
- Brand Safety & Vetting: Before a brand engages a creator, AI tools perform "digital forensics," scanning for past controversies, inappropriate language, or conflicting brand affiliations. This automated vetting process happens in minutes, a task that would take human researchers days to complete.
- Documentation: From briefing templates to contract standardization, automation handles the administrative paperwork, ensuring that every one of the 300,000 creators receives the correct legal and creative guidelines without requiring a human to hit "send" on every document.
Otis D. Gibson, founder and chief creative officer at Gertrude, Inc., supports this shift. In an emailed statement, he noted, "Having AI do the tedious admin work will allow everyone to focus on the part most visible to a brand’s audience—the creativity."
The Implications: Efficiency vs. Innovation
While the efficiency gains are undeniable, the shift toward automation is not without its critics and risks. The central tension in the industry today is the trade-off between the scale provided by AI and the loss of "human" flair.
The Risk of Homogenization
Jennifer Quigley-Jones of PMG warns that over-reliance on automation for content approval can lead to a "beige" brand presence. "That level of automation for content, it works, but it often will drive content to being unimaginative," she said.
When creators are forced to adhere to rigid, AI-generated briefs to ensure quick approval and avoid automated flagging, they are less likely to experiment. "It’s discouraging innovation on behalf of the creator," Quigley-Jones added. "If a creator tries something risky or truly unique, it gets flagged, the system stalls, and they face reshoots. Eventually, they learn to just play it safe."
The "Community" Challenge
Selina Sykes, global vp of digital, social and AI transformation at Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing group, acknowledges that while they have reached 300,000 partners, the goal is not just a database of names—it is the cultivation of communities.
"We’re not going to bring them all into a meeting—we’d have hundreds of thousands of people—but we’re building communities," Sykes said. The challenge for Unilever is to ensure that while the logistics of these relationships are automated, the spirit of the partnerships remains authentic.
The Trust Gap
Even at the executive level, there is a recognition that technology is still a "work in progress." Barreto noted that while the data intelligence is improving, the industry has not yet reached a state of total autonomy. "At some point, we are going to have more data and more intelligence, and we’re going to have more trust that it is the right thing, but I don’t think we are there yet," he admitted.
Looking Forward: The Hybrid Model
The future of creator marketing at a scale of 300,000+ is likely to be a hybrid model. In this scenario, AI handles the "three Ds": Discovery, Documentation, and Due Diligence. Meanwhile, humans—creative directors, brand managers, and talent scouts—will focus exclusively on the "three Cs": Collaboration, Curation, and Culture.
For Unilever, the move toward automation is an acknowledgment that the creator economy has graduated from an experimental marketing tactic to a fundamental business operation. Whether this approach will result in more authentic brand connections or merely a more efficient, automated echo chamber remains the defining question for the next decade of digital marketing. As the industry watches Unilever, one thing is clear: the era of the human-only influencer campaign is officially over.
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