“The times of big corporate big brand messages are gone,” Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez told investors in February 2026. Yet his company comes first among the seven that, according to Andrew Tindall of the research firm System1, are betting on investment in brand, and it builds its brand through nearly 300,000 creators. A study of creator ads by System1 and TikTok, however, found that the engagement rate, meaning audience reactions, barely explains brand recall.
As the official sponsor in the personal care category at the 2026 football World Cup, Unilever engaged more than 50,000 creators. Through them, and through social-first storytelling, the company is tapping into fan culture and conversations online. According to the company, this marks a move away from relying on logos and traditional media advertising spend.
Influencer marketing grew faster in Czechia than any other advertising segment
According to an estimate in the Advertising Report of the Czech Association of Communication Agencies (AKA), influencer marketing in Czechia grew by 29% in 2025, the most of any segment of the advertising market. In the same year, labelled paid partnerships on Czech Instagram tripled, according to the agency Lafluence. Tomáš Varga, head of Publicis Groupe for Central Europe, writes in the same report that trust is shifting from brands to people, influencers, creators and communities.
System1 measures brand building by the emotion in advertising
Creators, whom The Creative Dividend identified as the channel with the strongest long-term effect on brands, stronger even than TV, worked for Unilever brands during this year’s World Cup. The study was published by System1 and Effie Worldwide. It matched US and European campaigns from the Effie database with ad tests among roughly two hundred thousand respondents.
According to Tindall’s LinkedIn post from October 2026, campaigns built on emotion and distinctiveness are 7.5 times more likely to show profitable growth. Tindall is a co-author of the study. The comparison applies to campaigns running for three years or more, set against equally long campaigns without emotion, and the profit in them was self-reported by the companies in Effie case studies.
The Creator Effectiveness Playbook, a study published by System1, WPP Media and TikTok, measured emotion and brand recognition directly on creator ads. It examined paid creator ads on TikTok in eight countries. The European countries among them were Britain, Germany, France, Italy and Spain. The study tracks a metric called Brand Memory Lift, which measures the increase in brand recall after an ad.
In the June 2026 study, the engagement rate explains roughly 0.2% of the lift in recall. Creative quality, meaning emotion and brand recognition within two seconds, explains 54.6%. When a brand has to choose, the study advises prioritising the brand’s natural role in the creator’s world over the creator’s fame. Follower count does not reliably predict recognition among the creator’s audience.
Adweek columnist Mark Ritson had already called Fernandez’s new marketing doctrine wrong in February, and he sees mass reach as a condition for growth. By his calculation, even after half the budget moves to social media, more than four billion dollars at Unilever still goes into traditional broad-reach advertising. The share of turnover Unilever invested in brands and marketing stayed roughly the same in the first half of 2026, a tenth of a percentage point lower than a year earlier.
In the comments under the post, Danielle Emery, founder of Bluebird Marketing & Communications, asked whether brand building had ever really gone away, or whether budgets had simply tied marketers’ hands. When another commenter asked why companies had stopped building brands, Tindall replied, “We were sold on digital efficiencies.”
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