San Francisco, March 2025: Collective and Unilever – one of the world’s biggest consumer goods companies – have revealed how they are revolutionising marketing by harnessing AI-enabled digital twins to build stunning product imagery at scale and pace.

Announced at NVIDIA GTC 2025, Unilever’s CMO Esi Eggleston-Bracey joined Collective’s Founding Partner Adam Cleaver and Head of Creative Technology Stephane Bourez to showcase the work and share the results of their ongoing partnership, which has led to product imagery being created twice as fast and at half the cost.

If you couldn’t make it to San José, or missed the livestream, you can watch the talk by clicking here.

But we’ve also recapped our session for you below.

The Challenge: Scaling content without sacrificing quality

In today’s rapidly changing digital world, brands need to create more content than ever, across multiple platforms, formats, and markets, without losing quality, consistency, or brand integrity.

But traditional product imagery production is slow, expensive and repetitive.

So the question to answer is clear: how do you engage billions of consumers across billions of marketing moments while maintaining creative excellence?

The Solution: AI-Enabled Digital Twins

Collective has created a Digital Twin library for Unilever that provides single, interoperable ‘digital truths’ that any agency or production partner can use to create content faster, at scale and with 100% consistency.

Each twin is a physically accurate replica of a real-world product, enhanced by AI to maximise realism.

It’s also a product database containing every product, label and language variant providing effortless localisation, and powering product marketing across every channel – from social to TV.

And thanks to the real-time 3D in NVIDIA Omniverse (which gets rid of long render times), teams can also feedback, collaborate and update marketing visuals effortlessly and at incredible speed.

The benefits for Unilever:

• Create once, use everywhere: No more product shoots – a single twin can generate product visuals for everything from TV ads to e-commerce visuals.
• Ensures 100% brand consistency: Every product appears exactly as it should across 190+ global markets.
• Streamlines workflows: Reducing production timelines from months to weeks, and weeks to days.
• Lowers cost: Reducing or removing reliance on photoshoots or single-use 3D saving millions.
• Enables creativity: Removing repetitive low-value tasks to allow teams to focus on strategy and ideas.

Laying the foundations for brand-safe Gen AI usage

Digital twins are also helping solve another big issue: how to display products with 100% pixel-perfect consistency in generative AI workflows.

Collective showcased how they are developing a tool that seamlessly integrates twins into AI-generated backgrounds, ensuring both brand and product safety, every time.

Real-World Impact: Digital twins in action

Unilever’s Digital twin strategy is delivering product imagery two times faster and 50% cheaper, leading to 100% brand consistency. But it’s also unlocking creative possibilities. By removing the technical barriers and physical constraints of traditional production, anything becomes possible.

And thanks to Collective’s AI-driven automation, real-time 3D, and Omniverse integration, Unilever now has more time to focus on the big picture. As Esi Eggleston Bracey put it: “We’re not compromising on quality or creativity. We’re making content better, faster, and more impactful – at scale.”