Valia Sakkou is digital marketing and media strategy lead at Unilever Greece and 1Unilever countries in Europe, bringing over 25 years of experience in media planning, digital transformation, and performance media.
The men's grooming market is shifting from basic hygiene to holistic self-care, a trend fueled primarily by Millennials and Gen Z.
Consumers now demand premium products at reasonable prices, and as the market in Greece grows, so does fierce competition. We've also noticed that brand loyalty is long gone. Consumers are willing to switch whenever they see a more prominent product.
Our goal at Unilever Greece was to not only cut through this noise to build brand awareness for our new Axe Fine Fragrance Collection, but to also convert this attention into product consideration.
This was a challenge, especially considering that we wanted to mostly reach younger audiences who have a short attention span. Moreover, the path from awareness to purchase is complex and non-linear. Consumers may see one of our products, click away, encounter a competitor, and only then decide which one to buy.
Driving premium line performance with YouTube’s AI
While our core products have strong recognition, we constantly launch new variants, extensions, or campaigns. The challenge is ensuring that these additions get noticed. For example, this year we wanted to deepen our footprint in the premium segment. We needed a campaign that would not only build awareness but also drive brand salience and emotional connection.
The premium segment became the test case for our new strategy, which we developed in partnership with Initiative Athens agency, the member of IPG group. While our immediate objective was to elevate brand awareness within the high-value audiences of Gen Z and Millennials, our broader ambition was to craft a scalable framework applicable across our entire brand portfolio.
For years, we have relied on YouTube as a core pillar in our campaign strategies. This year, we wanted to expand our horizons, by experimenting with emerging tools, formats, and possibilities within the platform. Central to this evolution was the integration of advanced AI-powered solutions, enabling us to push the boundaries of personalisation and performance.
First, we tried Video View Campaigns (VVC). The VVC AI dynamically optimises ad delivery across all YouTube placements — in-stream, bumper, and in-feed — to prioritise not just views, but specifically viewers that are most likely to engage or convert.
Our test included two creative ad variants: "The Bear" and "The Baby". Both assets featured clear branding from the start and used storytelling with attention-grabbing visuals. However, "The Bear" significantly outperformed "The Baby". We believe the better performance was due to its stronger emotional resonance, more distinctive visual presence of a memory-clinging bear, and clearer storytelling. This informed our next steps.
Aligning ad placement with audience interests
For our “The Bear” video ad we also trialled YouTube Select Lineups to reach the top 1% of popular channels in Greece. Since our audience consists of young males, we focused on identifying Lineups that would resonate best with them.
We used Insights Finder to identify gaming as a high-indexed category. And we also decided to add sports and music, as it’s generally a topic young males are interested in.
The campaign resulted in a 6.9% increase in ad recall and a 3% lift in consideration classified by Google as “best in class”. Additionally, our Google Ads account showed that after seeing the ads, the audience was 46% more likely to search for the brand name in Greek and 8% more likely in English:
In addition to the excellent media performance, business results were also outstanding. The new premium fragrance variant featured in the campaign accounted for 5% of the brand's total share in just six months and generated 25% of the brand’s incremental turnover.
Extending beyond men’s grooming products
Building on this success, we expanded our AI-driven YouTube strategy to home care brand Skip.
The key difference in our approach from Axe is that we've used a combination of VVC and Lineups from the start, as this proved more effective than VVC alone. So far, we've achieved a search lift of 75% and a consideration lift of 2.5%.
Additionally, we have already planned to use these tactics for other categories too, such as food. That way we can test their efficiency across all product types and consumer segments.
