Meeting with Paul Polman

Today we (Simon, Laura, Richard Davies and I) had a meeting with the new Unilever CEO, Paul Polman to take him through the media teams vision, an overview of the landscape and our approach to planning and buying media.

First off I thought it was a great meeting for a number of reasons, but before I get into the meeting itself, I should note that it was significant for another reason. It was the first time that I know of that the media team ever met with the Unilever CEO for such a meeting. This talks to the priority that Simon Clift has made media and also talks to the importance of media as a function and a discipline.

The meeting started with Simon providing some context and intros, then Laura taking him through the overarching economic environment and its impact on advertisers, the media function, and our overall vision. Followed by me going through the consumer and media landscape, our work, how we measure, how the future looks and what we plan to do to improve our skill sets in the emerging space. And Richard going through what we spend, how we buy and the rigor by which we do it. Simon provided commentary throughout and was very supportive of us.

Mr. Polman was very engaged, very supportive and had several good thoughts on how we could improve. The primary theme was around us having better guidelines and doing things more consistently from brand to brand and country to country. He used the term “do a better job of institutionalizing our approach”. Some of his thoughts included:

- Embedding certain templates for how we spend our money. However he was not a fan of mandating xx percent by country in digital or whatever channel because he felt that should depend more on specific brand objectives. The idea was more to provide directional templates to get to more creatively optimized plans

- he felt that rather than do this across the board, we should start by focusing on top 10 brands in top 10 countries. Or whatever we feel the right number is. But make no mistake, he didn’t think we should just try...it was his opinion that it was our job to insure appropriate channel spending consistently across the brands and regions. He wasnt big on excuses of why some brands were not spending what we thought was appropriate. To him, thats our job and we need to make it happen.

- He thought we should do a better job of really understanding our consumer targets . He mentioned that as he has traveled around UL to all the countries he has felt that we have really fallen short in this area. While that is really the job of BD and BB, our role is to insure we can reach them effectively. For the most part I think we do that already, but his expection is that we should be more consistent in how we do that and more laser focused on consumer insights

- Interestingly, he’s more in tune with the digital space than most senior execs and more than many of our own senior management. He in fact asked us if we all had a facebook page and asked us for our POV on twitter. He also asked for a session in our lab. He thought many of the things we were doing to upgrade our teams and our brand teams skills in the emerging space were great ideas.

- He also believes that we are not good at in-store mktg and again suggested that P&G excels in this space. Falls more into the area of customer marketing, but its something for us to think about us well..

He has several other comments and we had some good discussions on a number of topics but those were really the key followups. He felt good about our vision, our knowledge base and our "passion" and seemed to feel comfortable with how we were going about our business. He often referred to his experiences at P&G and but said he didn’t think they had anything on us in terms of knowledge or passion. He also mentioned that he thought having a strong internal media group was very important to the business.

It's our time!