ALEX OWENS: I'm Alec Owens, written Alex,
I know very confusing, half Polish, half Scottish.
I work at Unilever and I often joke about what is my job?
I don't know.
We say the only constant is really change,
and I guess my day job changes from day to day.
But what I look after at Unilever
is what we call the People Data Centers.
I will come on to more of that in a second,
but just for those in the room who might not know much
about Unilever, let me just give you a little bit of background.
So we are the world's second biggest advertiser.
We spend $8 billion a year marketing to our consumers.
We operate across 200 markets, 500 brands.
I'm sure many of you, hopefully, will
know some of our more popular ones,
and ultimately, at the core of our business is sustainability.
We care passionately about environmental sustainability,
but also societal sustainability.
And last year, the brands that are purpose-led
actually grew 46% ahead of the rest of our business.
In the three years while we've been at [? roll-- ?]
in [? roll, ?] we've massively grown the sustainable business
that we have and strongly believe that brands with
purpose last.
We're undergoing currently in Unilever
a massive, massive digital transformation.
You know we're a simple business.
We're an R&D business to supply chain to sales to marketing.
But inevitably, if we are to serve our consumers
in the future then we need to do so in a very digital way,
and hence why we partnered with Google.
So a little bit behind what the People Data Centers are.
That's my job, effectively, I look after three pillars.
The first pillar is what we call a social and business analytics
capability.
So that's our ability to mine all the data
that we might have through search, social, ratings
interviews, or any other business data
that we might access, for example, sales data.
The second pillar, what we call our Consumer Engagement
Centers, or in simple language, are call centers.
That is a massive source of data for us,
whether that be consumers calling us about ideas
to do with products, or even product innovation ideas
that we can move forward with.
And the third pillar is what we call the Unilever PRM,
but more sensible people call CRM.
So how do we then digitize the way in which we market
and connect with the consumers?
We currently operate across 27 markets with the PDCs,
and we operate across probably now
about 30 or so different languages from Tagalog
to Bahasa to English to French to German, you name it.
I have a very simple objective of one billion one
to one relationships with our consumers
through meaningful and relevant dialogue.
Some people might say that's hard, but interestingly,
I've already achieved it.
Thank you very much to the support and help of Google.
2.5 billion people use our products every day.
If that's not an opportunity to catch data,
then I don't know what is.
We use Google Cloud capability quite significantly, actually
across our People Data Centers from whether or not
that be Google Translation as I said,
we operate across 30 plus different languages.
Vision API is a large part of what we partner on, and LOP.
You know inevitably, what we have
to do when we look at a search in social data is
be able to condense that into things such as sentiment.
And as a consequence of the partnership with Google,
which we see Unilever is very strategic,
we've managed to innovate much faster than we have ever
done before and more importantly,
use the capability in real time optimization
through all of the marketing that we do to our consumers.
I want to tell you a little bit about a case study then,
and as we said at the beginning, this is an interesting one.
We've run many different campaigns
at the moment using Google Cloud capability,
but this is a good one.
Basically Close Up-- many of you might not know it,
but it's a toothpaste brand and to give you
an idea of the scale and reach and personalization
that's possible through Unilever Cloud, I'm sorry,
we would call Google Cloud.
Unilever Cloud is actually they'll
be marketing cloud that we call it that we
use to do our campaigns.
We run this campaign across South and Southeast Asia.
Basically our search analytics told
us that everybody during Valentine's Day, or shall
we say all the younger kids, the second most searched thing
in Valentine's Day is what?
How to kiss.
And so therefore, we basically developed a campaign
around the art of kissing.
My partner probably tells me maybe I
need to have a look at Google to understand how to kiss.
It was a fascinating campaign not only
because we're tapping into the younger generation,
but more importantly, this campaign
went live across very culturally diverse parts
of our organization from Indonesia
to India to Singapore, where actually the art of kissing
is very different.
Our target consumers were often the younger side,
and as I said, ranging from Thailand and Indonesia to India
but it's wonderful how unification of kiss
brings people together.
So what did we end up finding?
I mean, the insights that we got from this helped to really
optimize the campaigns.
So we were using the Vision API to decode
the user-generated content and then using
that to change creatives to speak to consumers
in a much more relevant way.
So ultimately, what we realized in Indonesia
was the way that we were talking about the campaign
to the consumers wasn't as sensitive
to the cultural diversity as it needed to be.
And therefore, as the campaign went live,
we managed to optimize the campaign
real time to ensure that we're speaking
to those consumers in those markets in a much more
relevant way and being sensitive to the cultural diversity that
exists across the markets.
It was a four day campaign, and in that time,
we managed to reach over 500 million consumers.
We saw massive uplifts in things like our brand equity
and consideration, which for a marketer, is very important.
All of which was down to the fact
that we could use Google Vision API,
the LOP capability to enable us to understand
how the consumers were talking about the campaign,
and ultimately, optimize that real time.
So that's just one campaign.
There are many other campaigns that we've
done using Google Cloud capability,
both in terms of the analytics that it gives you
but also the tools.
And part of what makes Google Cloud at great partner
is its brainpower and its resources.
The data centric culture of test,
learn, and optimize has been pretty much the hallmark
of our relationship with Google.
And it makes us confident that ultimately going forwards,
we'll see new products and new applications
from them in the future.
As I said at the start, at Unilever,
sustainability both environmental
and societal and purposeful led brands
is important to what we stand for as an organization.
And like Google, I'm confident with the people
that we have in our teams that our partnership
will continue to thrive.
Thank you.