Unilever builds a Beauty AI Studio to make marketing assets up to 30% faster

The problem

Unilever's beauty and wellbeing brands need a steady flow of assets for paid social media, programmatic display advertising and e-commerce. A Unilever executive told Digiday the old way was to send briefs off and get content back, at about 20 assets per campaign. The company wanted a faster, more iterative way of working.

What they built

The Beauty AI Studio is an in-house system inside the Beauty & Wellbeing division. Unilever says it covers the whole content cycle, from first idea to personalised versions, for priority markets, for brands including Dove, Vaseline, POND'S and CLEAR. Digiday reports it runs on Pencil Pro, a generative AI tool from marketing services firm The Brandtech Group, which uses several large language models (software that generates text and images from instructions). Each brand in each market has a brand tool called Brand DNAi. It holds approved brand voices, values and rules so the AI draws only on approved material.

How they did it

Marketers write instructions and add what they know about the target audience. They generate images and video from 3D renders of the real products. Digiday says Unilever started working with Brandtech in 2023, tested Pencil in the first quarter of 2024 and spent much of the year before July 2025 designing and running the studio with an in-house specialist unit. It also reports 25,000 staff trained in AI fluency. Unilever says the studio lets teams improve assets in real time, guided by the best performing creative versions.

Results

Unilever reports that the studio produces assets up to 30% faster than before. It also says the system more than doubled video completion rate (how many viewers watch a video to the end) and click-through rate (how many viewers click). Digiday adds that a Unilever executive estimated about 400 assets per product on average, compared with about 20 per campaign before. The Unilever executive gave Digiday no estimate of cash savings.

What to copy

Treat the tool as a small part of the change. Unilever paired it with brand rules, training for thousands of staff and a performance feedback loop, and it measured business metrics rather than output alone.