Unilever’s IAB speech: The weasel squeaks

If you scrape beneath the surface of Unilever’s IAB speech, you may detect a few contradictions accompanied by the sound of squeaking, writes John Lowery

In a widely-reported speech at the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s annual leadership meeting in Palm Springs this week, Keith Weed, Unilever’s chief marketing officer, made a number of commitments, including these two:

“Unilever will not invest in platforms that do not protect children or which create division in society, and promote anger or hate.”

“Unilever will only partner with tech platforms and companies that are committed to creating better digital infrastructure, such as aligning around one measurement system and improving the customer experience.”

Can anyone but applaud?

After all, Facebook and YouTube have both offered platforms for the creation of division and the promotion of hate for some while now – the infamous video of the beheading of journalist James Foley appeared in 2014 – and despite both insisting that they’re taking steps to clean up their sites, hate speech, fake news, scenes of bestiality and worse continues to find its way into the public domain.

Equally, concerns over the measurement of viewing have been rife with independent forensic analysis suggesting that less than 10% of online impressions actually had a chance of being seen by a human being.
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The writing has been on the wall in double-embossed, gold leaf, block capitals for such a period now that you might be forgiven for thinking that Unilever would no longer be investing its advertising dollars on these platforms.

Well as it turns out, your thinking would be wrong.

If you scrape beneath the surface of those PowerPoint slides and listen to what Mr Weed said, you may detect a few contradictions accompanied by the sound of squeaking…not unlike that of a weasel.

Unilever’s online spend has actually been increasing since 2014 and it accounts for somewhere between a quarter and a third of its $9bn+ annual advertising budget. Indeed, only a few weeks ago, CFO Graeme Pitkethly, announced at a press call that the conglomerate was “stepping up” its investment in digital media, particularly around programmatic trading.

Which parts of “will not invest” and “only partner with” am I not understanding?

In search of an answer I stumbled upon an interview with Mr Weed that took place following his speech, at which point the squeaks became a little louder.

When asked by Tanya Dua of Business Insider whether he was going to pull investment on account of the failures of Facebook and Google to turn off their spewing sewage pipes, he replied that he wasn’t threatening them, rather he was making “very clear directional requests” and that “Public ultimatums don’t help, but being positively engaged in partnerships helps.”

I’m sorry but since when did grandstanding in front of an audience of hundreds of marketing and business folk at a swanky Californian conference, giving a speech that had been much trailed to the world’s media, stop being a public ultimatum?

In other utterances, the World Federation of Advertisers’ Global Marketer of the Year squeaked that, “of course there’s more work to be done”, “working closely with them [will have] much more of an impact than just walking away and telling them to sort things out” and “we believe in proactively leaning in to help shape the agenda”.

For all of you concerned about Russian intervention in the Brexit vote, fret not – Unilever is “leaning in” to Facebook and Google. (A bit like Margaret Thatcher “leaning in” to the Apartheid regime perhaps.)

If all of that wasn’t sufficiently weasley, Mr Weed also implied that Unilever’s “very rigorous” media buying strategy means that a Dove commercial showing a black woman turning into a white woman (Remember that?) had no chance of buttressing a Britain First propaganda video. And yet, in almost the same breath, he lamented that “some people are accidentally over-targeted and other people are ignored”.

Hmm. Is Unilever’s buying strategy rigorous or accidental? (Maybe it doesn’t matter if the ‘people’ are actually the Methbot.)

How are we to make sense of all of this squeaking? Well here’s one way…

Under the heading of the ‘Sustainable Living Plan’, Unilever has gone to great lengths to present itself as holier than thou. For ‘thou’, I’ve always read Procter and Gamble. The same Procter and Gamble that last year actually cut their online spend by $140m over fears that their ads were “not being placed according to [their] standards”.

“Shit! Who’s holier now?” worried Mr Weed, “I’d better reach for some metal polish and give our halo a squeaky clean at an industry conference.”

John Lowery is a marketing consultant who has worked both agency and client side

His most recent, contribution to the world of marketing was the strategy that yielded the #LidlSurprises campaign