Sarah Mansfield, Unilever’s VP of global media, is departing the consumer-goods giant after 12 years to set up her own consultancy.
The consultancy, called Barcarolle, already has its first client, an unnamed international whisky company, The Media Leader has learned.
The move comes amid broader turnover among Unilever’s senior leadership, including in its media team.
Mansfield has been at the heart of the Unilever Global Media function since 2012, when she was named media director for the UK & Ireland. She was named VP of global media in 2015, where she has led Media Operations and Ice Cream teams.
While at Unilever, Mansfield helped pioneer and embed a full-funnel “brand to demand” communications strategy, as well as develop Unilever’s retail media strategy.
More recently, she completed Unilever’s global media agency roster review — an account worth over $5bn annually — and has worked to evolve the brand’s media technology to better embrace digital media strategies.
Before joining Unilever, Mansfield worked as head of communications and planning at Barclaycard (part of Barclays Bank), where she helped launch mobile and contactless payments in the UK.
When approached for comment, Mansfield said: “I am super excited about taking this next step in my career and look forward to leveraging my many years of experience to the benefit of my future clients and continuing to support the future of the industry at large through my work with trade bodies”.
Unilever did not respond to a request for comment.
Media turnover at Unilever
Mansfield is the latest in a number of executives that have left the consumer goods giant in recent months.
Last month, Unilever’s executive vice president of global media Luis Di Como announced he would be exiting his role at the end of the year amid cost-cutting efforts. Diageo’s global media chief Isabel Massey was subsequently poached to become Unilever’s vice president of integrated brand experiences.
According to a former Unilever executive with direct knowledge of its media business, the turnover in senior leadership among Unilever’s media teams is part of a broader company organisation and not reflective of a media-specific cost-cutting strategy.
In June, the company announced it would be cutting a third of its office-based roles in Europe by the end of next year.
“Unilever has lost a huge number of some of the most experienced, well-trained leaders in the market,” the former employee told The Media Leader.
They noted that a number of senior leadership roles across the business, including in media, have been eliminated in the organisational chart, with multiple positions being “collapsed” into one.
The cost-cutting measures began to be instituted two years after activist investor Nelson Peltz was appointed a non-executive director of Unilever. Peltz is widely known for pushing for strong cost-cutting measures at companies, including similar efforts at Kraft Heinz and Mondelez.
