Unilever utilizes digital twins and AI for product shoots

Unilever is changing how it creates product images to keep up with high demand for content. The company’s Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Esi Eggleston Bracey, discussed these innovations at the NVIDIA GTC 2025 event. Unilever is using advanced technology to speed up its marketing strategies and enhance creativity. The goal is to produce personalized content quickly, allowing marketers to focus on big ideas that can increase sales. By using 3D technology like NVIDIA Omniverse, Unilever creates "digital twins" of its products, allowing them to make images twice as fast and at half the cost. This also ensures brand consistency. These digital representations include all product variations and details within a single file, simplifying the process. This approach has streamlined workflows, reducing duplication from an average of five processes down to one. Bracey emphasized the focus is not just on creating more content but on understanding customers' needs and desires. The new system allows for quicker and consistent content generation, which they call "creativity at the speed of life." Results from this strategy have been positive. For TRESemmé in Thailand, there was an 87% drop in content creation costs and content was produced twice as fast. There was also a 5% increase in purchase intent. The technology has now been applied across other brands like Dove and Vaseline, achieving significant savings and improvement in content performance. By creating a single, accurate source for product images, Unilever can now dedicate more time to innovative content development. The company is also using AI widely to enhance creativity and streamline processes, with over 500 AI applications in use.