Leandro Barreto, Unilever's global CMO, used his Cannes session to push back on the idea that the company is simply "going social first." The real shift, he argued, is "going reality first," building brands around what other people actually want to say about them rather than what the brand wants to say about itself. His test for any brand is simple: do people keep telling its stories when the marketers have left the room. Most brands, he said, fail that test, not because media isn't working but because the work was never meaningful enough to be shared.
Meaning Over Volume
He framed the problem as an industry that has confused motion with meaning. The tools now exist to make infinite content and distribute it instantly, and in the rush marketers have become very efficient at making things people ignore. The question he wants teams to ask first is what is actually worth sharing.
Getting there, he said, takes three things: clear meaning, a genuine commitment to co-creation, and a system designed to support it. Without all three, a brand is "just noise wearing a creator's face." He summed up the balance as "poetry and plumbing," where poetry is consumer intimacy, cultural relevance and creative courage, and plumbing is the systems and technology that let a story scale. Without poetry nothing matters, and without plumbing nothing spreads.
Dove: Clarity That Travels
Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, launched in 2004, replaced airbrushed models with real women and a single idea: that beauty should be a source of confidence, not anxiety. Twenty years on, Barreto's point was that the idea has held precisely because the brand never wavered on it, even as social media, beauty standards and culture shifted around it. Clarity travels and confusion doesn't, he said, and consistency is less about repeating an ad than stewarding a meaning. If a brand doesn't know what it stands for, creators have nothing to carry.
He made it concrete with two examples. The first was Dove's self-esteem work against toxic online beauty content. A mother whose daughter, Mary, had developed an eating disorder fueled by social media sent Barreto pages from the girl's diary, and allowed Dove to share the story so other parents could see the pressure their children face. His point was that the family reached Dove not through an ad but because other people had already carried the brand's meaning into their homes and conversations. The second was Dove's role in the fight against race-based hair discrimination, where Black women and girls were penalized at school and work for natural hair. Rather than run a campaign at them, Dove joined the coalition pushing to make that discrimination illegal, the work behind the CROWN Act.
His most recent Dove example flipped the usual control of advertising. To launch a repair mask, the team went to Reddit, asked for unfiltered reviews from users with handles like, and committed in advance to running the first 50 reviews verbatim as the campaign, good or bad. The ads quoted real complaints alongside the praise, on the bet that honesty from strangers is more persuasive than polish from the brand.
Vaseline: Letting Communities Expand the Brand
Vaseline was his case study in getting out of the brand's own way. For years people had invented their own uses for the product, from marathon runners guarding against chafing to a public health system recommending it for hay fever to parents smoothing it on children's faces. None of it was briefed, and the brand's first instinct was to shut it down and stay in its lane. That instinct, he said, was wrong, because those users were not diluting Vaseline, they were expanding it into places the brand had never earned its way into.
So the brand did the opposite and built a campaign out of the behavior. It tracked down the real originators behind the most-copied online "Vaseline hacks," including an eyebrow-grooming trick that traced back to a 2008 blog post, and turned their ideas into actual products, crediting the creators and giving them a cut of every sale. People who had been quietly remixed by the internet for over a decade suddenly had a product on a shelf and a check attached to it.
He closed with the South African ritual of parents rubbing Vaseline on their kids' faces before school, the "go shine" moment, where what people remember years later is not the product but a parent's hands and the care behind them. Vaseline didn't manufacture that meaning, he noted, it had simply been carried there for a hundred years.
Hellmann's: When People Make You Part of Their Identity
Hellmann's was his example of a 120-year-old brand secure enough in its identity that it can follow its fans into strange places. When an NFL quarterback started stirring Hellmann's mayonnaise into his coffee on social media and the internet recoiled, the brand's instinct could have been to distance itself. Instead, Barreto said, the question they asked was what the moment revealed about who they are to people. They signed the quarterback, made the partnership official, and even produced a mayo-scented cologne off the back of it, turning a viral oddity into owned brand culture. The deeper signal, he argued, is that some fans care enough to tattoo the Hellmann's logo on their bodies. When someone makes your brand part of their identity like that, you don't control it, you earn it.
Creators Are Torchbearers, Not a Channel
His sharpest critique was reserved for how the industry treats creators, reducing them to distribution and media inventory. They are not a channel, he argued. They are the people who decide whether a brand lives beyond its paid media, and they carry things because the work means something to them and their community, not because they were paid.
He ended on the image of brands as fires and creators as the people who carry them. A brand can still buy media on every platform, he said, but once no one chooses to pass it on, something more important has already disappeared. If that feels true of your brands, his diagnosis was blunt: you probably don't have a media or creator problem, you have a "nothing worth sharing" problem.
Three Ideas to Take Away
- Build something worth repeating, then trust others to repeat it. Stop asking what the brand wants to say and start asking what people want to carry.
- Clarity is the price of co-creation. Dove's Real Beauty held up because its meaning was clear enough for others to carry without supervision.
- Pair poetry with plumbing. Cultural courage and consumer intimacy need systems and technology behind them, or the story never scales.