Unilever and L’Oréal now work with roughly 500,000 creators each as household brands move ad money to TikTok and Instagram to reach Gen Z.
The biggest names on supermarket shelves are hiring creators at a scale that would have sounded absurd a few years ago. According to the Financial Times, as summarized by Traders Union‘s Anton Kharitonov, consumer goods giants are moving more of their advertising budgets into influencer marketing as they try to hold off faster-growing challenger brands.
Half a million creators per company
Traders Union, citing the FT, reports that Unilever under chief executive Fernando Fernandez now works with about 500,000 influencers, seven times the number it used two years ago. For the FIFA World Cup alone, the Dove maker had more than 52,000 creators promoting its deodorants and shampoos. L’Oréal, the world’s largest beauty group, is also working with about 500,000 influencers, up from about 140,000 in 2024.
According to Marketing Dive‘s Chris Kelly, Unilever itself says it now relies on 500,000 content creators, up from the 300,000 it reported earlier and far more than the roughly 20,000 it used before Fernandez took over. The push is part of a plan to shift half of the company’s digital ad spend to social-first and creator-driven marketing. “We have embraced social-first marketing at a very significant speed, and this is showing in the way we are growing our key brands,” Fernandez said at Unilever’s November 4 investor event.
Everyone is joining in
It isn’t just Unilever and L’Oréal. Traders Union reports that General Mills, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola are all spending more on TikTok and Instagram campaigns aimed at consumers who spend hours a day on their phones. The Interactive Advertising Bureau says U.S. creator ad spending doubled between 2021 and 2024 to $29.5 billion, and it projects the total will reach $43.9 billion by the end of this year.
The pressure is coming from smaller rivals. Bain says direct-to-consumer insurgent brands account for 40 percent of growth in the U.S. consumer goods industry while holding less than 2 percent of the market, according to the same report.
AI is managing the crowd
Working with that many creators takes automation. Companies are increasingly using AI to find, vet and brief influencers and then monitor what they post. P&G chief information officer Seth Cohen says generative AI tools alert the company when influencers, which it calls key opinion leaders, go off message, while Unilever says its monitoring system is governed by human judgment, Traders Union reports.
Marketing Dive adds that Unilever uses AI to find, brief, vet and measure creators whose content delivers 1.5 times the return of brand-made content. The company says it is producing 12 times more content than in 2024 at a 90 percent lower cost, and that video now has a useful life of about four days before returns on platforms like Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon and Walmart turn negative.
The takeaway
For creators, this is a demand story. Some of the world’s largest advertisers are no longer testing influencer marketing; they are rebuilding their budgets around it and recruiting creators by the hundreds of thousands. The catch is that brands are pairing that demand with AI tools that watch every post, short content shelf lives and a constant need for fresh material. Creators who can deliver reliable, on-brief content quickly are the ones best placed to cash in.
Image: AI-generated illustration.
