Creator marketing has reached the point where the hard part is no longer finding more creators. It is managing what happens when a brand suddenly has hundreds of thousands of them.
That is the operational problem Unilever is now trying to solve. The company has grown its creator program from 10,000 to 300,000 creators, after making creators a core part of its marketing plan last year. And as Digiday reports, Unilever is using AI and automated systems to handle more of the infrastructure around that scale, while keeping the relationship and creative judgment with humans.
That distinction matters. This is not Unilever saying AI should decide who gets to tell brand stories. It is saying that some parts of creator marketing should probably not be done in spreadsheets anymore.
The system behind 300,000 creators
Leandro Barreto, chief marketing officer for Unilever’s beauty and wellbeing business group, shared the company’s approach during a roundtable at Cannes Lions. His framing was blunt: technology is being used to “augment the human choices,” not replace them.
For a company whose brand portfolio spans categories and markets, the scale is huge. Unilever products are sold in 190 countries, which means creator discovery, vetting, brand safety checks, paperwork, approvals, and talent management can quickly become a machine of their own.
So Unilever is automating the grunt work. One unnamed tool can scan social videos to find people already sharing positive stories about its products, then surface them as potential creator partners. Other automated workflows are being used for discovery, vetting, documentation, and administrative tasks that would otherwise sit with internal teams or agencies.
That does not make the creator relationship less important. It makes the relationship the part Unilever is trying to protect. If AI can produce a qualified list of brand-safe creators in minutes instead of having teams search across Google and social platforms manually, the human work can shift toward judgment: who fits the brand, who can build trust, and who should be given room to create.
Creator scale is now an infrastructure question
The interesting part is not that Unilever is using AI. Everyone is using AI, or at least saying they are. The interesting part is what Unilever is choosing not to automate.
At 300,000 creators, influencer marketing starts to look less like campaign casting and more like supply-chain management for attention. There are inputs, checks, approvals, risks, outputs, and feedback loops. The danger is that brands start treating creators like inventory. Unilever’s line, at least for now, is that automation should make the system faster without turning the creator into a row in a database.
For marketers, this is the real shift. Creator programs are moving from occasional activations into always-on operating models. That requires tools, yes. But it also requires a clearer idea of where human taste still matters. Automating brand safety checks is different from automating creative fit. Scanning for people who already love your products is different from deciding whether they can tell a story your audience will believe.
It also changes what creators are being optimized for. Organic enthusiasm, past product mentions, tone, safety, consistency, and audience context become signals that machines can surface. But machines can only surface what they are trained to see. The final edge still comes from knowing when a smaller creator, a stranger format, or a less obvious match is exactly the right call.
Unilever’s move shows where creator marketing is heading next: not toward more influencers for the sake of more reach, but toward systems that can handle scale without flattening the relationships that made creator marketing valuable in the first place.