Unilever’s chief marketing officer, Keith Weed, gave agencies six months to get the message, “get it together or leave”. Weed has been telling all who would listen that agencies need to be more integrated, to “retake the initiative of leading the multi-agency approach, even if all the agencies are not in their holding company”.

“We need to find ways to lead with brands and not by channels. We need to find ways to orchestrate an integrated approach,” he stated in June. If your agency didn’t get the message then this will.

This week, Unilever began a formal global digital agency review.

Why? One reason is sure to be a shortfall against expectations in global sales. Unilever’s Q2 results showed underlying sales growth of 3.8% vs expectations of 4.3%.

At a press conference in December last year, Weed described the role that had been created for him at Unilever: “Crafting Brands for Life was very much what that is all about. It’s really trying to understand people’s whole lives and if you live in the emerging markets, it is making this huge shift from rural to urban. People’s lives are changing dramatically…for the first time with mankind we are urban more than we are rural. More people were living in towns last year than ever before and by 2030 the primary habitat of mankind will be slums. You put all of that together and we are a consumer business and we want to grow and serve the 2 billion extra people who are going to join this planet over the next few years, then we’ll have to think about how we’ll do things differently. So our marketing needs to take this on board.”

Last month at Cannes, Weed’s aim became clearer. Inside his analysis of Unilever’s Project Sunlight, on which twelve agencies had worked, was a message: “What I’m really concerned about is in that room [Project Sunlight] you have all kinds of specialists. We need to, it’s a specialist world, but they’re trying to deliver a 110% solution for mobile and 110% for social but I want a 110% solution for the brand. Even if it’s 85% solution in mobile and 90% solution in social that’s a real challenge. Our channels are driving what we’re doing too much now, and it’s fragmenting brands.”

Unilever’s rethink across brands and digital practices includes creative, web development, online marketing, mobile, social media and data and analytics.

Unilever’s meassage for creative is encouraging. In June, Weed said, “I think there has never been such a premium on creativity… Creativity is more and more important to break through the clutter…We need to suck the best creativity into the industry.” And to suck the best creativity into Unilever, it launched The Unilever Foundry. The Unilever Foundry is connecting Unilever with fresh thinking by providing funding and mentoring to start-ups for initiatives and projects.

The agencies invited to participate in the global digital roster review, which is being managed by Medialink, include incumbents and non-incumbents and spans a number of agency holding companies. Presentations will take place in mid-August. A decision is expected by the end of the year. The results of an earlier US digital agency roster evaluation will be incorporated into the wider review.

Unilever’s current digital agencies include: WPP’s Ogilvy, Publicis’ Razorfish, IPG’s Huge, R/GA and Lowe Profero, Engine Group’s Noise, and independent VaynerMedia. For social media, Unilever primarily uses PR companies such as Edelman, GolinHarris and Weber Shandwick.

Unilever increased its global advertising spend by 8% to US$8.6 billion (6.5 billion euros). Digital ad spending rose nearly 40%.

At the same time, Unilever has been trimming the fat, or as it calls it “non-working media – the part of the advertising spend which is used to make films, pay agencies and the like.”