Laura Klauberg, senior vice presi- dent of global media at Unilever
Klauberg is the first woman, and first American, to head media for Unilever’s global marketing operations, where she personally controls the world’s second largest media budget—a full $4.7 billion a year. Which means her opinion matters—a lot.
It was Klauberg, after all, who recently sparked heartburn throughout the U.S. television industry when she appeared to ques- tion the wisdom of allocating TV ad budgets months in advance, dur- ing the so-called “upfront” season, when media buyers make commitments to secure advertising time in the following fall’s TV schedule—arguing that a rapidly changing media market demands more nimble maneuvering.
In Klauberg’s view, digital media is fundamentally transforming the way both brands and consumers use media. Simply “going digi- tal” means very little. To truly capitalize on the power of on-demand experience requires what she calls a “big brand idea” driven by con- sumer insight.
Rick Mathieson: Unilever is one of the world’s largest and most
important advertisers—especially in television. How is that starting to change?
Laura Klauberg: Historically if you looked at the way we spent
our communication dollars, even as recently as five years ago, you would see a pretty traditional-looking mix, which was largely televi- sion driven. And we have also always been a pretty significant spender in print, and in magazines specifically. Those two mediums used to constitute 90 percent of our overall communication mix.
But if you look at it today, it’s significantly changed. TV still dominates our spend, but we’ve dramatically diversified our com- munication mix, where print still is important, television’s still important, but the whole digital space is growing significantly and more than doubles every year in terms of the total dollars that we’re investing.
RM: What have you learned so far as you have started to invest
more heavily in digital?
LK: The first lesson—and this lesson I think pertains to any
medium—is to stress the brand idea. If you have a big brand idea, whether you’re talking about television, or you’re talking about print, or you’re talking about digital, it makes a significant differ- ence. Particularly in the digital space because it provides an oppor- tunity to engage consumers in unprecedented ways—in ways that just running a thirty-second television ad or a static print ad didn’t in the past.
But if it doesn’t start at the core with a really engaging brand idea, no one’s going to bother to interact with or engage with you.
RM: Obviously some of the most innovative work Unilever’s done
has been for the Dove brand, with the “Campaign for Real Beauty.” Why, even after all these years, has this multiplatform initiative been so powerful in the marketplace?
LK: It goes back to the essence of what Dove is about; it’s about
redefining beauty stereotypes.
What we’ve learned on a global basis is that women feel passionate about that subject. And any time you find a group of consumers that feels passionate about something, they want to speak out on it.
I think that whole brand platform has really lent itself to the digi- tal space because we’ve afforded women an opportunity—whether it’s posting a message on a message board or it’s [asking consumers to cre- ate] a Dove commercial, as in the case of Dove Cream Oil, where we got far more entries than we had ever anticipated.
When women feel strongly about something, and you give them a platform to speak out, or to create something, or to engage with one another, they’ll jump on it. That’s why they’ll send a video to all their friends. They’ll post the Evolution video on their Facebook page or their MySpace profile and write on the Dove message board on our
site. They’ll go and create a piece of advertising that is their view of what the brand is about.
If we had just been talking about how we clean better than soap, I don’t think we would’ve had that response. The Dove idea really res- onates emotionally with women.
RM: From the outside looking in, this seems like a leap of faith: a
major beauty industry brand encouraging women to eschew beauty industry stereotypes.
LK: It goes back to consumer insights. It’s about really under-
standing what the consumer is saying, how she feels. There was a strong insight that women felt very, very strongly about that issue. They’ve been told for years you need to be ninety pounds and be beautiful and look like Barbie.
And the reality is we had done a global study a number of years ago where we learned that 2 percent of women around the world felt beau- tiful. That was a real “ah-ha” moment for us. I think moving to that campaign idea wasn’t an easy one. It took a lot of risk and a lot of courage. But in the end, everyone held hands and said we think this was the right thing to do with the brand.
That’s in part because it was actually consistent with the heritage of Dove. Dove had always used real women in their advertising. They basically had used a testimonial format for years. You always had real women talking about their lives, their skin, their families, in a very authentic away.
So I think it was very consistent with the heritage of the brand, but it took it to a whole new level. And you’ve seen what the response has been.
RM: How do initiatives like this provide a guidepost to the differ-
ent ways in which people consume and interact with brand messages?
LK: What we’re seeing is that traditional thirty-second advertising
And I think that whether we won an award or we didn’t win an award, that made a statement within the advertising community—par- ticularly among those communities that tended to historically think in terms of thirty-second TV ads—that the world has really changed.
The experience that we had with Evolution was a real wake-up call to anyone who was not a believer that other types of mediums, other formats, other ways to engage consumers are incredibly powerful, incredibly impactful.
RM: Of course, “Campaign for Real Beauty” isn’t the only ground-
breaking initiative from Unilever.
LK: We did something called In the Motherhood, which was a
series of online webisodes sponsored by Suave. The Suave brand really appeals to the average mom who puts her family and every- thing in her life before herself and before her own personal needs. For In the Motherhood, we actually asked consumers to contribute ideas for scripts.
Professional scriptwriters would polish up the consumers’ ideas, and then we produced those into short videos that were aired online.
The results were pretty astounding. We had over five million con- sumers come to the site. The reason why it was so engaging is that it was content and a subject that women felt deeply about, which led them to really engage and to really interact.
We think it’s actually a very, very big idea—bigger than just doing online webisodes. We think the whole campaign has real legs.
That’s an example of having, at the core, an idea that resonates [with your target], whether it’s women, or it’s eighteen-year-old guys in the case of AXE, or it’s thirty-year-old guys in the case of Degree [deodorant].
We have found that with most of the campaigns that we’ve done, whether it ties into the Oscars in the case of Dove, or whether there’s a tie-in with the show 24 on Fox, which we did with Degree, identify- ing those things in the culture that are highly relevant to consumers,
yet have a natural affinity with our brands, is how we have found lots of success in terms of building consumer engagement.
RM: You recently caused more than a few television executives
to go apoplectic when you appeared to question the wisdom of allo- cating TV advertising budgets months in advance during the so- called upfront season. Are you thinking about foregoing the upfronts?
LK: Television still is a very significant piece of our mix. So we’re
not pulling out of the upfront.
But what we have done is, we have tried to develop a channel- agnostic approach, which starts with the big brand idea.
And [that comes from] knowing what we know about who we’re trying to reach, how they consume media, how they engage, how they interact, what’s the best way for us to get that message to consumers. And in some cases it may be 100 percent digital program. In the case of AXE, where I’m trying to reach an eighteen-year-old guy, well, most eighteen-year-old guys aren’t heavy television consumers. So how do I reach them?
If I have a very broad target—and I really need mass reach—TV may be the primary medium, but there may be many other ways in which to reach the consumer.
RM: What’s your advice to marketers hoping to create a culture of
digital innovation throughout a large marketing operation like yours?
LK: One of the things that we’ve actually done here at Unilever,
which I think has been great, is that we’ve challenged all of our mar- keting people to embrace the new consumer technologies.
It’s one thing to hear about it, read about it. But unless you your- self are doing it, and working with it—particularly if you have a brand that’s used by somewhat younger consumers—it’s very difficult to develop a multiplatform marketing campaign when you yourself don’t really fully understand or use the technology.
Just as an example: I don’t know how many times in my career I’ve worked with marketing people that said they never watch TV. Or ‘I never read a magazine.’ But yet they’re in marketing.
I’ve heard that over the years, many, many times from colleagues who weren’t heavy television viewers.
If you look at a lot of the things that we’ve done in the last few years, a lot of it has been integration with content—finding the right marriage between content and our brand. And if you don’t know what the content is, it’s very difficult to be able to identify what those oppor- tunities might be.
If you never watched the show 24, you would never know that it was a perfect fit with the Degree brand, which is about managing stress. ‘Protection for when you need it most.’ Well, you can’t think of a better character than Jack Bauer. But if you’ve never turned on Fox and watched 24 you’d never know.
So it’s about really being in tune with the culture, and then finding the points where there might be a great intersection of a brand and what’s important to consumers.
We’ve also done some fun things internally. We have a program called “Translators.” It’s somewhat of a mentoring program but it works in reverse.
We pair young new marketing people, people that are just out of school, with senior executives. And they spend an hour or so once a month basically engaging in technology.
So as an example, [back when the iPhone first came out] I had a ses- sion with one of the junior people here. And he sent me an email three days before and said these are some options on what we can do in our session. So I said I love them all, but make sure you bring your iPhone. He did bring his iPhone, and we did an hour demo. And of course I wanted one the second he left my office.
We’re doing things like that because what you’ll find is that, in our business in general, but particularly with people that have been around for fifteen or twenty years, they’re not as savvy when it comes to
understanding some of the new technologies. It’s sometimes like, “What’s ‘social networking?’” or “‘Community,’ what is that?”
We all have Facebook profiles. I have the benefit of having three daughters who are right in the bull’s-eye there.
Obviously, I live with them, so I probably am more attuned to what’s happening—partially because of my role, partially because of the life I live with them. So I’m very, very much aware of how they consume media.
They don’t sit in front of the television for hours. It’s just not the way they grew up, and I’m not convinced that’s what they’ll do when they’re thirty.
I also think you have to be willing to take some risk. You have to be willing to let go of your brand a bit.
When we decided to do Dove Cream Oil and invite consumers to make a TV commercial, you have to be willing to see what kind of ads consumers are going to make on your behalf.
You really do have to give up an element of control and not be afraid to do so.
On Evolution, there must’ve been a dozen parodies that were on the Internet.
One was called Slobolution, which basically ripped off the entire approach. They even used our music. They took this nice-looking guy and in two minutes he was smoking and drinking beers and eating cheeseburgers and turned into this fat slobby-looking guy at the end.
So it’s a shift in mindset. We don’t control—we can’t control— what’s out there, and we have to start getting comfortable with that.
RM: You mentioned your teenage daughters. Tell me what else
you’ve learned from them and how they’ve impacted the way you view digital.
LK: It’s interesting. They live on Facebook and it’s their whole way
of living and breathing and communicating. It’s kind of their life. And that for me has been absolutely astounding.
Here’s a funny story. I went and set up a Facebook profile, and I ‘friended’ them. And I caused a riot among about 200 kids. Within lit- erally hours, there were posts on everybody’s pages about keeping me out. And so I sat there alone for about three months. Then we got a bunch of people in the office to do it. So now I have many more friends than I did before.
It was an interesting experience because that’s really their world. They do everything on-demand, on their terms.
They’ll watch a fair amount of TV shows that they like, but they watch them time shifted, or they watch the DVD.
But ‘appointment viewing’ for them is very rare. They don’t line up on Thursday nights to watch Grey’s Anatomy. They’ll watch
Grey’s Anatomy and they like Grey’s Anatomy, but they tend to watch
it when they want to watch it, as opposed to when the network runs the show.
Every week you read about another magazine going out of busi- ness or just migrating to a digital version. Teens still consume print magazines, predominantly in the fashion arena. But their world is really a digital world. And that’s how they consume music. That’s how they consume news. That’s how they maintain a relationship with their friends. It’s a very, very different world than the world I grew up in.
So it really has had a pretty big impact on me, in terms of the way I think about the way we’ve communicated historically and the great need to rethink how we market our brands.
RM: Was your interaction with your kids an inspiration for your
own transformation, switching from brand marketing, which you did for many years, to media a few years back?
LK: I don’t know if that was really the impetus. I would say just
having been in this business for years, I’ve seen a sea change occurring. I think there’s been more change in the last two years than there was the prior twenty.
I think what’s exciting about it from a marketer’s standpoint is I like to say, ‘If you can imagine it you can probably do it.’ There really are no set rules.
If you just look at some of the most creative, innovative work that we’ve done as marketers in the last two years or so, the sky’s the limit. So I’m finding this a very, very exciting time to work in this space, being a kind of mix of entertainment, brands, and collaboration with consumers. It’s just a whole new way to communicate. And it causes us, as marketers, to really rethink how we go to market.
Rule #
2
MAYBE JUSTIN TIMBERLAKEdeserved the quick kick to the crotch.
The young pop star—whose impossibly high-pitched voice momentarily spiked an octave higher—had just been propelled through the air and flown into a mailbox, his legs splayed in a flinch-inspiring moment that made for a hugely entertaining TV commercial for Pepsi-Cola.
Needless to say, the spot had something for everyone. Teenage girls got to swoon over the guy who once boasted he’s single-handedly “bringing sexy back”—I hadn’t realized it’d gone anywhere—before scrambling to take part in a Pepsi sweepstakes for tickets to his next concert.
And detractors got to enjoy the Schadenfreude of Timberlake’s ill-fated flight—initiated, apparently, by women willing him closer through the sheer power of sipping Pepsi.
I guess you had to see it. And you probably did.