I’ve been fascinated by how Unilever is reinventing digital creative at scale. Earlier this year, they rolled out the Beauty AI Studio, an entirely in-house, generative-AI content assembly line. This platform now powers creative for their Beauty & Wellbeing brands across 18 markets, including names like Dove, TRESemmé and Vaseline.
What Makes It Different
Before the Beauty AI Studio, briefs would be sent to external teams, and the finished work would arrive days or weeks later. Now the process is far more agile and iterative. Instead of producing 20 assets per campaign, teams are generating around 400 per product. These are feeding paid social, programmatic display and e-commerce with far more creative variety and testing opportunities.
The engine behind it is a generative AI tool that combines multiple large language models with access to key advertising platforms for real-time effectiveness measurement. Marketers start with prompts informed by audience insights and use 3D renders—digital twins—of each product as the creative foundation. Built-in safeguards ensure every asset stays true to brand guidelines and compliance requirements.
Already the system is proving faster, cheaper and more effective, with significant uplifts in brand intent, purchase intent and engagement.
The Power of Digital Twins
This isn’t just about AI generating images from scratch. Unilever is also building high-fidelity 3D digital twins of each product. These photorealistic replicas capture every variant, language label and angle in one master file. That means a single source of truth for every campaign, and assets that can be deployed instantly across any market without the cost and time of repeated product shoots.
The reported savings are substantial. Production costs are more than halved, turnaround times are cut by two-thirds, and creative performance metrics are seeing double-digit lifts. It’s not just efficiency—it’s unlocking a new scale and speed of content creation.
The People Side: Mindset, Skills and Structure
What I find most compelling is the cultural shift behind the technology. Selina Sykes, who heads marketing transformation for the division, has been clear that success in this space is not just about the tools—it’s about mindset. Teams need to learn fast, embrace experimentation and work in short, iterative bursts rather than long, linear campaign cycles.
Instead of creating siloed AI teams, Unilever is embedding AI fluency across all disciplines. Every marketer is expected to understand the basics of prompting, iteration and measurement. Training is widespread, and experimentation is encouraged. The aim is not to replace creativity but to amplify it, freeing people from repetitive production tasks so they can focus on insight, storytelling and strategic thinking.
What This Means for Marketers
A Creative Arms Race Is Coming
The cost of AI tools is falling, and the pattern is clear: the ability to produce large volumes of content and continuously test them will soon be within reach for many more organisations. The era of relying on a single hero creative is coming to an end.
In-House Creative as the New Normal
Retail media networks and brands with significant advertising output will need a plan for similar capabilities within the next 18 months. Creative production is becoming systematised, and experimentation will be a standard part of campaign development.
Prompt Crafting and Insight Capture Matter More Than Ever
In this new world, knowing what to ask for is just as important as making the creative itself. Marketers who can translate audience insight into effective prompts will be the ones who get the most out of these systems.
Agencies Must Adapt—or Step Aside
Agencies will have to evolve their offering. Some will specialise in being the AI-powered creative partners for brands, others will focus on the insight and strategy layer. But the reality is that more brands will bring parts of this capability in-house.
Final Thoughts
Unilever’s Beauty AI Studio is more than a technology roll-out, it’s a blueprint for a new way of doing marketing. It blends technology, creativity and data in a continuous loop, supported by a mindset of speed, experimentation and cross-disciplinary skills.
For marketers everywhere, the message is clear. The future isn’t just about having great ideas. It’s about building the systems and cultures that allow you to generate, test and scale those ideas at a pace the market has never seen before.
