Unilever Foods Appoints SAMY to Lead Influencer Strategy Across 13 Markets

Unilever Foods has appointed social-first agency SAMY to lead its global influencer marketing strategy, covering major food brands Hellmann's and Knorr across 13 markets. The appointment was announced in late March 2026.

Mandate Spans 13 Markets, Including Southeast Asia

The partnership covers the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, France, Poland, Canada, Argentina, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines. The explicit inclusion of Indonesia and the Philippines marks a clear signal that Southeast Asia is a priority for Unilever's food marketing agenda.

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Central to the mandate is SAMY's proprietary Maia platform, which provides access to a database of over 120 million influencers globally. The platform also delivers real-time performance tracking and campaign optimization tools. Unilever Foods' global media manager, Meg Bass, said the partnership would combine "technology and data with deep knowledge of the whole social ecosystem, leading to more informed decisions around where and how we activate creator partnerships across markets."

SAMY will operate from a UK central hub supported by local teams in each of the 13 markets. The agency is contractually required to deliver deployment frameworks, measurement models, and audience connection tracking, not just campaign execution.

Unilever Shifts to Creator-Led Brand Building

The appointment reflects a formal strategic shift at Unilever Foods toward what the company calls a "many-to-many" brand-building model. This approach treats creator networks as a primary brand-building channel rather than a supplementary one.

Sonsoles Piñeiro Kruik, SAMY's chief growth officer, described the operating model: "With teams working across continents, we'll bring hyper-local intelligence into a shared global system, enabling Unilever to orchestrate influencer activity at scale while ensuring creator partnerships are shaped by the realities of each local market, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach."

The mandate also reflects growing demand from senior executives for measurable returns on influencer investment. The inclusion of audience tracking and measurement models as contractual deliverables indicates that accountability, not just reach, is a core requirement.

Regional Context and Competitive Landscape

The two Southeast Asian markets included in the mandate, Indonesia and the Philippines, are characterized by strong micro and nano influencer activity, where brands work with smaller creators who have highly engaged, niche audiences. Live commerce, where influencers sell products directly during live video streams, is also growing rapidly across the region. The Unilever-SAMY mandate does not explicitly address live commerce activation in these markets, based on available information.

The competitive environment for influencer platforms in Asia-Pacific is also intensifying. Fabulate, a regional influencer platform with AI-driven capabilities, won Gold for Best Influencer Marketing Platform at the Marketech APAC 2025 Awards in October 2025, illustrating that locally embedded regional platforms are actively competing in the same space.

China and India are notably absent from the 13-market scope, despite being two of the largest influencer marketing ecosystems in the region.

Unilever's Pattern of Category-Level Agency Appointments

This appointment follows an established pattern at Unilever. In 2023, the company appointed Publicis as media agency of record for its newly independent ice-cream business, covering China, India, and Indonesia. That deal covered media planning, buying, and strategy across those three markets.

The SAMY appointment applies the same category-level agency logic to the foods division, with influencer strategy as the specific focus. The two mandates together illustrate Unilever's preference for specialized, category-specific agency partnerships rather than a single global agency covering all functions.

Local market teams will begin activating creator programs for Hellmann's and Knorr under the new framework following the announcement.