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‘Overhaul your behaviour’: Unilever warns digital media industry
Unilever’s marketing boss Keith Weed is threatening to pull investment from platforms that “breed division” or fail to protect children from toxic content.
Unilever’s Keith Weed has just announced an ultimatum. The company “will not invest in platforms that do not protect children or which create division in society”. According to him, Unilever does not want to advertise on platforms that do not “make a positive contribution to society”.
Weed’s comments come a year after Procter & Gamble’s brand chief Marc Pritchard issued his own rallying cry to the industry, calling on the digital media supply chain to clean up its act or risk P&G pulling investment. Almost exactly a year ago, he gave digital media companies a year to adhere to his deadline.
So far, P&G has given no indication that it plans to pull spend from the big players, although it is yet to go back to advertising on YouTube having cut spend when brand safety problems were brought to its attention.
What is not fully clear is how Unilever will hold digital platforms to account or at what point it would actually pull spend. Watch this space.