Unilever’s CMO Keith Weed has told agencies they have not moved fast enough to cope with the pace of change in the modern world and must find new business models to stop more advertisers taking work in-house.
“The world has moved very fast and my experience is the agencies haven’t moved fast enough,” Weed said at IAB Engage on Thursday (7 June).
The marketing boss of one of the world’s biggest advertisers said agencies should not be enabling companies such as Unilever to move ahead of them, citing the FMCG brand’s development of dozens of data centres alongside its in-house content-producing agency, U-Studios.
“They should have gone ahead of us. They should have been building that sort of thing themselves and offering it to us as a service,” he said.[advert position=”left”]
In Unilever’s 2017 annual report the company said it had saved around 30 percent on agency fees after taking more of its ad work in-house. On Thursday Weed reiterated that his in-house content teams, which are established in more than 20 countries, were also able to produce faster results than external agencies.
“[Agencies] need to create a fit-for-purpose, competitive model that will work in this modern world…telling me I can’t [do something at a particular price] is absolutely fine, but the answer is I’ll find somebody who can.”
Despite the bleak message to agencies, which are already struggling with increased competition from consultancies such as Accenture muscling their way into their market, Weed said he still had a lot of “love” for them.
“I think there’s everything to play for in the agency world if they reinvent themselves,” he said, adding that as a client he wants them to work harder at “simplifying complexity” and selling it back to him.
Online clean up
Weed also gave an update on the state of online media, praising the industry for having made “significant” progress amounting to a “step change” after calling out social media companies earlier this year for negatively impacting society.
“The most striking progress from the beginning of last year to this year is that both Google/Youtube and Facebook are now taking responsibility for the content on their platforms,” he said.
“In a single quarter, YouTube took down eight million videos through a combination of AI and humans – 75% removed before one impression. Facebook has doubled its human moderation to 14,000 people.”
Weed called this a “massive shift”, although he said there is still a long way to go in terms of increasing human moderation and improving the accuracy of AI.
Just three months ago Unilever threatened to pull investment from the likes of Facebook, Google and Amazon if they failed to protect children, promote hate, or create division in society.
Additional reporting by Michaela Jefferson
