HUL: 30,000 creators, most premium media on digital

Hindustan Unilever puts more than 60 percent of the media spend behind its premium brands into digital, the company has disclosed. HUL has also set out that it is investing disproportionately behind that premium portfolio, with 2X more investment going behind those brands.

The creator side is the more unusual disclosure. According to HUL, it is building a 30,000-creator ecosystem in India, and 100 percent of its brands are covered by influencer activity under an advocacy-led model. That is coverage across the portfolio as a standing condition rather than a campaign layer added to the brands that can carry one.

Kissan is the named example of what the premium push looks like in practice. The company is repositioning it from a condiment brand into a flavour-focused platform, with a Gen Z-first approach.

On the plumbing, HUL has described an AI-led media strategy that takes in AI-enabled content studios and a proprietary tool for media deployment.

For a smaller brand, the benchmark that actually moves is not the 60 percent. Digital-majority media plans stopped being a signal in India some time ago. It is the coverage claim. If the largest FMCG advertiser in the country treats creator activity as something every brand in the portfolio has by default, then a brand of yours with no creator activity against it is a gap that shows up in comparison, not a considered decision about focus.

Two questions worth answering this quarter. First, how many of your sub-brands or hero SKUs have zero creator activity running against them right now, and did anyone actually decide that. Second, who holds the creator relationships, you or your agency. An advocacy-led model of the kind HUL describes only compounds if the roster and the performance history stay with the brand across agency changes. If your creator list lives in somebody else’s spreadsheet, you are renting the coverage rather than building it.

The AI piece is worth watching and not worth copying yet. A proprietary media deployment tool earns out at HUL’s spend level in a way it will not at yours. The transferable idea is the content studio, because portfolio-wide creator coverage turns into an asset supply problem long before it turns into a targeting problem.