Unilever products featured as a demo for digital twin, Unilever Global.
During the Nvidia GTC 2025 conference held in San Jose, California Unilever’s Chief Growth and Marketing Officer, Esi Eggleston Bracey discussed Unilever utilizing Nvidia Omniverse, Digital Twin, and AI technology to streamline the conglomerate’s marketing campaign. Executives from the partner company, Collective, accompanied Eggleston during a talk session discussing the potential revolution of AI technologies in the commercial production and marketing industry.
Eggleston explained Nvidia Omniverse technology has helped Unilever become more efficient in terms of time and cost for the company’s global marketing campaign stating that AI-generated packing shots of its product reduced the time of traditional production in half. Digital twins of products featured in marketing can be made to replicate the real-world counterparts with near-perfect replicas being made digitally can be customized to cater to region-specific labels saving time and money spent for region-specific packaging photo shoots as shown in one of Dove’s bottles being recreated digitally to indistinguishable real-world counterpart.
Digital twin replica of Dove’s product using generative AI and omniverse, Unilever Global
TRESemmé, one of Unilever’s beauty brands, has shown its application of generative AI in its campaign for Thailand. The brand showcased product shots created using only generative AI in one of their commercials posted across different mediums. The result was more efficient compared to traditional commercial production filming. This marks the beginning of the future application of AI technology in the film production industry and how this will disrupt the way commercial shooting is done in the future.
Traditional product commercials were done similarly to how the movie industry produced a full-scale feature-length movie. The amount of effort that goes through with a product shot is tremendously similar to how each scene in a movie is coordinated efforts from 50 to 100 people production crews from many different fields of work (communications, marketers, arts, technicians, etc.). This means that typically companies like Unilever have to spend millions of dollars for a single shot of their product for a specific market.
Digital Twin Model of TRESemmé Products for TRESemmé Thailand Marketing Campaign, Unilever Global
The implementation of Artificial intelligence technology has made the process more efficient. AI technology and others, like digital twins, enable the majority of the process of creating a scene to become automated. As Unilever has shown in its GTC 2025 demo, the efficiency of commercial production has doubled. The efficiency of localizing each promotion material becomes 100 percent more efficient with the utilization of generative AI.
In the near future, we can expect to see increased implementation of AI in the industry, as the technology has advanced significantly since its initial introduction around 2020. Generative AI, in particular, is poised to have a greater impact on our daily lives, as it can automate many repetitive and mundane tasks. For example, on commercial sets, AI can potentially replace entire teams dedicated to tasks like production and packing shots, as it can quickly render everything needed for an entire commercial.
The arrival of generative AI and digital twins begs the question of workers and their unemployment due to the tech has the potential to replace many of the people working in the industry to craft one of the most sophisticated pieces of content for companies. Generative AI will affect these job positions by reducing people involved in the process. However, these are tools that have to have humans as the ones to have input on the final product. In addition, there will be demand for new job positions that are primarily focused on creating generative models and 3D artists to work on digital twins.
Unilever has also mentioned their partner company “Collective”. Collective Founder and Electronic Data Collection (EDC) Adam Cleaver discussed their involvement with creating digital twins for Unilever. He talks about their previous work creating digital twins for other companies as well like Volvo and Mercedes. This technology has been implemented in a wide variety of industries product shoots, not limited to beauty products. However, Unilever is the first to apply the digital twin technology resulting in better efficiency and engagement in the everyday consumer product industry. This breakthrough allows the potential for more companies to shift to a generative model of marketing that we can see in the near future.
Generative AI, introduced to the public in 2021 with tools like ChatGPT and Midjourney, has caused significant changes across various industries. Companies like Unilever have adopted generative AI to decrease the time and cost associated with adapting promotional materials for different regions, leading to increased efficiency in production. Although this technology has the potential to replace certain job roles, human involvement remains essential for ensuring ethical data usage, correcting errors, and providing creative input. Both Unilever and Collective have committed to maintaining these ethical standards in their use of AI.
