Unilever's AI Revolution: Digital Twins Boosting ROI
As digital marketing evolves across the world, global brands are facing challenges in maintaining consistency and engagement across their consumer touchpoints.
Today's market is characterised by an explosion of digital touchpoints that influence consumer choices across various media, social platforms, retail environments and search engines – and each interaction with a potential customer becomes vital to brand engagement and eventual sales.
This has led AI and digital simulation technologies to innovate solutions – and now, Unilever is leveraging AI-powered digital twins for marketing.
Unilever's exploration of AI-driven marketing is a new way of how global brands can connect with consumers by using Nvidia's Omniverse platform.
The company has begun transforming its content creation pipeline, producing digital assets that are not only more cost-effective but also more responsive to market demands.
Furthermore, by using Nvidia's Omniverse, Unilever has adopted digital twins to streamline content creation.
The impact of AI and digital twins on Unilever’s marketing strategy
The incorporation of this technology at Unilever enables the brand to optimise content that is both relevant and personalised, thus liberating marketing professionals to delve into more creative and innovative endeavours.
Esi Egglestone Bracey, the company's Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, recently highlighted Unilever’s advancements at Nvidia's GTC 2025 conference:
“This isn't about pushing out more content – anyone can do that.
“It's about starting with a deep understanding of people’s needs and desires, executing our campaigns with creativity and backed by a high-quality content creation machine to deliver desire at scale.”
These advancements have allowed the company to generate product imagery at double the speed and reduced cost, enhancing brand consistency and consumer engagement.
According to Esi: “We've transformed what was once a complex, slow process into a marketing system that frees up our teams to focus on what they do best – think bigger, be creative, push boundaries and create magic for our brands.”
The power of digital twins for effective brand representation
Key to Unilever's brand strategy is the creation of digital twins — AI-powered, real-time, physically accurate 3D representations of products.
The digital twins encapsulate all variants of a product, including labels, packaging and languages in a single file, establishing a digital consistency across all marketing channels.
Then the images, integrated seamlessly into AI-enhanced workflows, facilitate faster content production and delivery while reducing the energy and resource drain typically associated with such processes.
TRESemmé Thailand, for instance, is another company which has experienced substantial benefits from this approach, slashing content creation costs by 87%, doubling content creation speed and boosting purchase intent by 5%.
“Our product twins can be deployed everywhere and anywhere, accurately and consistently, so content is generated faster and on brand. We call it creativity at the speed of life,” says Esi.
This means that the adoption of digital twins not only simplifies production processes but also enhances product appeal and market readiness.
Additionally, Unilever's beauty and wellbeing brands, including TRESemmé, Dove, Vaseline and Clear, have begun statewide incorporation of digital twins, leading to qualitatively higher engagement metrics.
These innovations form a part of a broader AI adoption and scaling initiative at Unilever, which spans more than 500 AI applications across various divisions such as product R&D, marketing, supply chain optimisation, innovation and customer service.
“Our digital twins do not work in isolation,” Esi concludes. “We have created bespoke tools at Unilever to integrate them into our content ecosystem.”
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