Unilever CMO Keith Weed to Retire -- 2nd Update
December 06 2018 - 3:43PM
Dow Jones News
By Suzanne Vranica
Unilever Chief Marketing Officer Keith Weed will retire from the
company in May, the consumer-products giant said Thursday.
Mr. Weed, 57 years old, has been at Unilever for 35 years. The
announcement of his departure comes shortly after the company named
Alan Jope to succeed longtime Chief Executive Paul Polman. The
company, along with its rivals, faces many challenges, including a
shift in consumer tastes.
"I am moving onto another chapter," Mr. Weed said in an
interview.
Mr. Weed has been an outspoken marketer for many years and has
long advocated for better measurement of digital advertising. He
frequently called on digital companies such as Google and Facebook
to "stop grading their own homework."
More recently, Mr. Weed began leveraging Unilever's ad spending
power to push the digital media industry to weed out content that
exploits children, spreads false news, or supports racist and
sexist views.
Mr. Weed said he intends to stay active in the industry and
continue to push for change.
"The biggest challenge we have is that we need to rebuild trust
in advertising," he said. "The industry still needs to work harder"
to fix the things that are undermining that trust such as data
breaches, the bombardment of ads, fake followers and fake news, he
added.
"These issue are all solvable," Mr. Weed said.
Unilever spent more than $9 billion last year marketing its
brands such as Lipton, Dove and Knorr, according to the company's
annual report.
"I have been privileged to lead some of the best Marketing,
Sustainability and Communication teams in the world," Mr. Weed said
in a statement. "As the world's second largest advertiser, we have
been able to leverage our scale for effectiveness and efficiencies,
and we have also been able to leverage our scale for good, leading
to greater responsibility, transparency and accountability in the
advertising and digital industry."
Mr. Weed's role was increasingly in question at Unilever in
recent years, particularly after Unilever found itself on the
receiving end of a hostile bid from Kraft Heinz Co., according to
people familiar with the matter.
While Mr. Weed led a team that accelerated Unilever's push into
digital marketing and is responsible for all Unilever's
relationships with agencies, he doesn't control any of the
marketing budget for its brands, which is instead controlled by its
three division heads, the people said.
One option now, according to one of the people, is for Unilever
to scrap the CMO role and instead assign responsibility for the
marketing functions to marketing heads within each of its three
categories: beauty and personal care, home care, and food and
refreshments. The company has a deep bench of people with marketing
expertise it could choose from for such roles, the person said.
Unilever has been trying to simplify its way of working to be
more agile and responsive, a drive it accelerated after Kraft's
approach. Devolving the marketing role could help it delayer and
make more locally focused decisions, said this person.
A spokeswoman said the company won't immediately name a
successor because the decision will be up to Mr. Jope, who starts
as CEO next month.
Mr. Jope has been described by people who have worked with him
as a brand builder himself, someone who is likely to be more
focused than the departing CEO on Unilever's marketing.
In an internal memo announcing Mr. Weed's retirement, Unilever
also said its head of research and development, David Blanchard,
was stepping down and will be succeeded by GlaxoSmithKline PLC's
head of research and development for consumer health care, Richard
Slater. Mr. Blanchard has worked at Unilever since 1986 and had
been its R&D chief since 2014.
Write to Suzanne Vranica at suzanne.vranica@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 06, 2018 15:28 ET (20:28 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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