Don't just buy influence. Build for it.

Fernando Fernandez wants to turn Unilever into a "machine of demand creation."

In his first public appearance as CEO in March, he announced spend on social will shift from 30% to 50%, and a twentyfold increase in influencer partnerships.

"Creating marketing activity systems where others can speak for your brand at scale is incredibly important," said Fernandez. "Influencers, celebrities, TikTokers – these are the voices that matter."

It's a line that speaks to efficiency, and something deeper: a recognition that corporate voice no longer carries cultural weight. "Messages from brands coming from corporations are suspicious messages." Influence, in this light, isn't just reach. It's a reputational workaround.

Unilever has always been a useful barometer for where brand marketing is heading. Rarely first, never last, generally indicative of where the middle will end up.

The FMCG giant's latest moves echo what many marketers have known for some time: that social is chronically underfunded relative to its impact, and that influence now stretches far beyond one-off campaigns or tactical awareness plays.

Most brands won't copy Unilever's budget decisions. They can't. But they don't need to. Success in social is less a matter of spend than fluency: the systems, creative infrastructure and operational maturity that allow a brand to stay coherent, even when others are doing the talking.

In this week's edition, we explore what that shift demands — not for the brands that can afford to buy influence in bulk, but for the ones that need to build for it.

Social = infrastructure, not output

For years, social media sat on the outer edge of brand strategy. The last leg of a campaign, a place to push what had already been signed off elsewhere.

That relationship still exists, but it's no longer solely functional. The feed is no longer where brands show up, but where they live — and those treating social as a content channel are being outpaced by those treating it as infrastructure.

This isn't just a shift in planning. It's a shift in operating logic. "Social is where brand relevance is built and maintained in real time," says Will Hamnett, VP commercial strategy and partnerships at The News Movement. "What was once seen as lower-funnel has become foundational. Social is now the flywheel — always-on, always-adjusting, and capable of moving people from awareness to advocacy without them ever leaving the feed."

Which means the brand isn't being expressed in stages anymore. It's being interpreted constantly, and in public.

"It's not a slice of the brand experience," adds Bryony Leslie Barker, associate strategy partner at Digital Natives. "It's the whole picture."

And if social is the picture, then everything else becomes part of the frame — the tone, the rhythm, the speed. What used to be campaign logic now has to function as infrastructure.

That comes with consequences. If the brand is constantly live, remixable and circulating in forms the team may never see, the systems behind it can't stay static. Paid, organic, and creator content now land in the same scroll — indistinguishable to the eye, but rarely planned as one.

What breaks isn't the content, but the logic behind it. Format specialism matters. So does tone fluency, and the ability to manage nuance without defaulting to control.

This pressure is new. The underinvestment isn't. Social has long been central to consumer attention yet inside many organisations, remains treated as a support function. Strategically visible, structurally underbuilt, often resourced for channel tactics over system design. And now, expected to shoulder the weight of the brand.

Narrative control now depends on something softer: rhythm. Knowing what can flex, and what can't. Recognising when something's off, not just when it's wrong.

The structural shift is already visible in how clients engage social-native agencies. "Most of our retainer relationships are social-first AORs," says Alannah Daniel, director of marketing and new business at Coolr. "It's a testament to the importance of social within the marketing mix to build brands."

Alexander Jeater, managing director at Favola, echoes Hamnett's sentiments that the best-in-class owned social media profiles are always on. "The key is to be people first. 90% of TikToks feature a person, which can be executed via creators of influencers, employee generated content (EGC) or user generated content (UGC.)"

Jeater points to SheerLuxe as an example of this infrastructure done well. "They're episodic, team-led and keep their audience eagerly anticipating more."

The strategy isn't novel, but done right it's executed with clarity. Familiar faces, established formats, a tone that stretches just far enough. Social that behaves more like a lifestyle channel than a campaign feed. That distinction is operational, not just aesthetic.

"The best brands are listening and engaging with their target audience each and every day," Jeater adds. Always-on content demands always-on feedback. It needs teams who understand how platform nuance shapes performance — and how nuance erodes before it's noticed.

Most brands can publish fast, but can they stay legible while doing it? For teams working across platforms, partners and legacy systems, coherence isn't just a creative task. It's an operational burden.

Bigger isn't always better

Fernandez's suggestion that Unilever might activate an influencer in each of India's 19,000 zip codes was widely quoted — not because it was likely, but because it made a useful point.

In a decentralised world, influence is proximity. And the more surface area a brand can cover, the more trust it can claim. It's an appealing equation: more voices, more relevance. But relevance without consistency doesn't last.

This is the paradox embedded in the move to scale. As brands increase the number of creators speaking for them, the infrastructure behind that distribution matters more, not less.

As Jane Ostler, EVP of global solutions marketing at Kantar, told The Drum, "If 50% of your budget is going into social, you're essentially outsourcing 50% of your brand voice."

Handing over voice at scale without clear oversight risks undermining long-term brand equity. Unless you're structured to manage that voice — to brief, edit, align and evolve it — you're not building presence. You're fragmenting it.

For a business sitting on a $35bn brand portfolio, that drift isn't just reputational. It's financial.

That erosion happens gradually; in tone drift, creative misfires, and partnerships that feel off by a few degrees. Not enough to cause damage individually. Enough to dilute trust cumulatively.

The risk applies to any brand operating without clear creative systems: voice, tone, feedback loops, and editorial guidance. Without those, influence accumulates at the edges, off-centre.

That's compounded by the economics. Most of this growth won't come from big-budget partnerships. It'll come from micro- and unpaid creator amplification — more surface area, less depth and even less oversight. The brand might be everywhere, but no one's watching closely.

The marketing majority won't scale like Unilever, but that limitation offers clarity. When you can't outspend the problem, you're forced to structure for it: to focus on systems that maintain coherence when the message isn't yours anymore.

That's not about doing less. It's about designing smarter, with considered workflows, clearer creative governance and partnerships that deliver continuity, not just impressions.

"We don't work at scale," says Hamnett. "Our creator work is highly targeted, typically involving a handful of trusted messengers or 'newsfluencers' at any one time." This decision reflects a structural model where the brand isn't controlling the message, but still defines the pattern.

The pattern's the point. Trust doesn't come from decentralisation; it comes from coherence in spite of it.

Less a voice, more a system

If influence now lives at the edge of the brand — in creator ecosystems, remix culture, and whatever moment the algorithm serves next — then coherence can't be enforced. It has to be designed in.

That doesn't mean more governance. It means systems that can tolerate variation without dissolving in the process: modular content, editorial guardrails, contributor relationships that don't need to be resold every quarter.

"Brands with always-on creator programs can help reduce content production costs for organic social," says Emma Wills, group strategy director at SEEN Connects. "It can flex for a brand's evolving needs, as an agile, distributed content studio."

It's a tidy phrase and a tidy system, if you can build one. But most can't. Because what sounds like agility often masks an absence of internal clarity: messy briefs, generic decks, everything held together by a moodboard and a prayer.

There are the exceptions. SEEN Connects' long-running collaboration between Missoma and Lucy Williams has survived algorithm shifts, aesthetic cycles and six collections.

"We were the first jewellery brand to collaborate with an influencer in 2015, when influencer marketing was still in its infancy," writes founder and creative director, Marisa Hordern. "Our customers and followers could see it was authentic and responded to that; Lucy wore her pieces every day because she wanted to; and certainly, the longevity of this partnership is a testament to that authenticity."

That kind of longevity matters even more now; not just because it builds trust, but because it builds rhythm. The structures underneath allowed it to evolve without having to be re-invented. Williams wasn't briefed into the brand — she already wore it. The brand doesn't have to reintroduce itself every time it shows up.

That logic also shaped online food platform Mob Kitchen's 2024 partnership with Deliveroo Groceries. The collaboration was led by Mob's in-house creative team, using their own roster of creators and familiar recipe formats.

It embedded the brand inside a system that already had audience trust. Mob's creator network functioned as a recurring asset; a soft power advantage in a noisy feed economy.

UPS Business Trips didn't just feature series creator Kareem Rahma — it borrowed his rhythm. Just a camera, a driver, and Rahma doing what he does best: making people feel seen, offhandedly.

The series aired on UPS's own channels — their message, his tone. Structure and trust in the right ratio.

Which is, increasingly, the difference. Some brands still treat creators like rented reach: brief, buy, hope. Others are starting to realise that fluency isn't just a tone of voice. It's a system.

What social really demands

Unilever's pivot is a signal that control is no longer the defining condition of brand-building — and that influence, increasingly, lives outside the centre. When more of the brand is expressed elsewhere — by creators, customers, contributors — the real question isn't what gets said but rather, what holds up.

While most brands can't match Unilever's spending power, they can adapt to the same fundamental shifts through their infrastructure. By paying attention to their editorial logic and feedback loops, and the creative memory that stops brands from starting over every time they try something new. Without that, scale fragments and reach often gets mistaken for resonance.

Many of the brands and social-native agencies already working this way didn't choose to be early. They understand and can react to micro trends, the texture of the algorithm, and the nuance of each platform's culture. They built this fluency by necessity, not resourcing. That constraint is starting to look like an advantage.

Fernandez's media pivot sits alongside deeper operational changes: divesting slow-growth categories, doubling down on premium lines, and reorienting Unilever toward value creation over volume.

It suggests a shift from managing for efficiency to building for elasticity; designing brands that can stretch into new formats, partners and platforms, without losing their edge or shape.

In a market where trust is built in the feed and brand value is increasingly driven by cultural presence, elasticity becomes structural.

Not simply bigger, but built for influence.

Natasha Randhawa, newsletter editor.

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