Unilever taps into creative crowdsourcing to up marketing ante

Unilever has struck a partnership with crowdsourcing portal, eYeka, to tap into its global creative community to up the ante across its marketing and communication activities.

The partnership kicked off officially on 1 June and covers Unilever’s Asia-Pacific, Middle East, Russia and South African market operations. eYeka will work across the FMCG company’s entire brand portfolio, which includes Clear, Close Up, Cornetto, Lipton, Lux, Pond’s and Comfort.

eYeka is a Paris-based crowdsourcing site founded in 2006 by French entrepreneurs Gilles Babinet and Franck Perrier, and aims to fill the gap between professional creative and production agencies, and consumers posting to sites such as Flickr and YouTube. It claims to have a community of 250,000 creative consumers who work with marketing teams to co-produce marketing and communication campaigns, and has launched 520 co-creation projects to date.

“A key role for us as marketers is to create magic and to excite people with innovative ideas,” Unilever vice-president of media for Asia, Africa, Middle East, Turkey and Russia, Rahul Welde, said.

“Inviting creative consumers to give their best ideas offers Unilever a great opportunity to re-invent and challenge ourselves. We have worked with the eYeka community for two years on a number of projects and now extend that relationship further and deeper.”

eYeka CEO, François Pétavy, claimed the partnership signalled the importance of crowdsourcing as a business and ideas enabler. Other eYeka customers include Coca-Cola, Danone, Hyundai, Microsoft and Citroen.

“We have long advocated turning to consumers for ideas and content with consumers as a source of competitive advantage so we are thrilled to partner with Unilever to bring this approach to a new scale,” he added.

The crowdsourcing company has already assisted Unilever with a range of material recently such as the Lux ‘Captivate the world, reveal a true beauty’ and Omo ‘Tell us an unconventional and surprising story about how a resourceful mum creatively teaches her children an important lesson, through dirt and stains’ campaigns.

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