“The times of big corporate big brand messages are gone,” Fernando Fernandez told investors at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York (CAGNY) conference last week.
The Unilever CEO went further. His company was pivoting to a “social-first demand model,” arguing that an army of creators will replace the traditional advertising that had built Unilever’s brands for half a century.
Before we get to whether he’s right, let’s appreciate how strange it is that he’s saying it at all.
Fernando Fernandez has been Unilever’s CEO for 11 months. He runs a business in 190 countries, with 400 brands, 124 factories, and $60 billion in annual turnover. He has a CMO—the seasoned Leandro Barreto—whose actual job is to have views on communications strategy. And yet, here is the chief executive personally pronouncing an entire category of marketing communication finished.
CEOs don’t do this. They keep their public marketing commentary professionally vague and deliberately content-free: “We believe in the power of our brands.” “We’re investing in our biggest opportunities.” The tactical specifics are usually left to the CMO because it’s their job to handle it, and because a CEO publicly freelancing about advertising trends usually culminates in embarrassment. Even most CMOs avoid categorical declarations of this kind. Fernandez, apparently, did not get the memo.
Let’s address the actual claim. Is big brand advertising dead?
Of course it isn’t. People who declare things dead in marketing are always wrong.
There is also a rather spectacular contradiction embedded in Fernandez’s declaration, and it is sitting right there in Unilever’s own numbers. In its full-year 2025 results, released ten days before his CAGNY speech, Unilever reported investing 16% of revenue on brand and marketing. On revenues of $60 billion, that is roughly $9 billion.
The social pivot, moving from 30% to 50% of media budget into creators and influencers, is dramatic. But do the math. The 50% not going to social still means somewhere north of $4 billion going to traditional, broad-reach advertising channels. That’s a giant advertising budget sitting in the very format Fernandez has declared deceased.
In the same results call where he declared big brand advertising dead, Fernandez flagged Unilever’s sponsorship of the 2026 FIFA World Cup as “a real support” for the company’s performance. You do not write a nine-figure check to sponsor the World Cup to run creator content in 19,000 Indian zip codes. You sponsor it for mass global reach. For the kind of big, corporate, broadcast brand messages he had just told investors, seconds earlier, was finished.
Even if it was true—and the evidence does not support this—that creators outperform traditional advertising for brand building, the answer would still never be to pour everything into any one channel. Integrated marketing communications is not just a theoretical nicety in a textbook. It is how effective advertising actually works.
