Geoff Seeley Director Global Media Innovation Unilever Region: Global
Back to the art of storytelling By Adrian Pennington
IT IS A SIGN OF how relevant IBC has become to anyone seeking to understand the impact of technology on media consumption, that it attracts global brands the scale of Unilever. “It’s importance for us to
cement relationships with all the stakeholders in this market now, which when you break it down, comes down to content and how you distribute content,” says Geoff Seeley, Unilever’s director global media innovation. “IBC is a pretty good place to speak to content players and distribution players.” Seeley has responsibility for driving the company’s digital change agenda across a number of their biggest brands including Dove and Sunsilk
comprising communications planning and content develop- ment across 190 markets. “We have to consider
ourselves a media company as much as anything,” he says. “Our packaging is in front of two billion people daily. We have built relationships with 40 million people though social media. A large audience has declared an interest in what we have to say, so we are becoming a media owner in our own right.” Having spent decades perfecting the art of TV adver- tising, Seeley says the world’s second largest advertiser (after P&G) “remains committed to TV as a super powerful medium” with approximately 80% of its €6 billion annual spend trained on spot advertising. “We are looking to enhance the TV advertising we deploy,” he says. “The question is, how do we do that if TV is no longer the start, middle and end of the
We remain committed to TV as a super powerful medium
story? Where do we need to sit and what need to we produce around TV?”
He explains, “We are going back to the art of storytelling and looking at how narrative can be transferred across different screens, the role that each screen and channel has, and
identifying what part of the story we deploy to get a message across. The analogy we use is that our story used to have one chapter - a big fat 30-second chapter including plot, characters, twist and pay-off. Now that story is made up of 200-300 different chapters and
audiences are opening it up at different start points. We have to get our heads around that, and I’m not saying we’ve cracked it, but the essence remains the same - to create and distribute content that supports our brands by adding value to the consumer through entertainment or utility.” Seeley joined Unilever in 2011 with a background at digital and media agencies including Vizeum and Airlock. “It will be interesting to see what happens to the linear broadcast model with greater penetration of connected TV,” he explains. “From a worldwide
perspective the penetration of smartphones into emerging markets is key. Over 50% of our revenue comes from emerging markets so we are equally interested in how technology is being adopted in Brazil and India as we are in Silicon Valley.”
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