Social-first is not a strategy.

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Unilever CEO Fernando Fernandez dropped a bomb at CAGNY last week. 'The times of big corporate big brand messages are gone,' he told investors, announcing a pivot to a 'social-first demand model' that will shift media spend from 30% to 50% into creators and influencers. Given that Unilever's brand and marketing investment hit its highest level in more than a decade in 2025, at 16.1% of turnover (nearly €10bn), this was not a minor repositioning. It was a wholesale strategic shift from the world's second-largest advertiser.

Mark Ritson's response in Adweek was characteristically pointed, and the broader industry reaction split predictably along familiar lines: social vs. broadcast, brand vs. performance.

The trouble is that the debate has been framed too narrowly. Social vs. broadcast. Brand vs. performance. Neither framing gets to the more useful question for marketing leaders right now.

The real question is simpler and harder: can you build a brand through social-first channels, or does social-first inevitably collapse into performance marketing?

One brand is answering that question in real time.

What Topshop is actually doing

When Topshop relaunched last year under a joint venture between ASOS and Heartland, the Danish holding company behind Bestseller, the team had no flagship store, no broadcast media budget and a brand that had spent four years slowly disappearing inside a marketplace. UK clothing market share had slipped to 0.19%, according to GlobalData.

Global marketing director Moses Rashid has been transparent about the approach: social media sits at the heart of the media plan. Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, with plans to rebuild YouTube. No major above-the-line campaign. Budget concentrated on activations that generate earned coverage and organic social content.

On paper, this sounds exactly like what Fernandez is describing. Social-first. Creator-led. Media-light.

Look at what Topshop has actually executed, though, and the distinction becomes clear.

They took over Trafalgar Square, one of the most recognisable public spaces in the world, for a free, open-to-the-public runway show. Models walked down the steps of the National Gallery. Cara Delevingne and Adwoa Aboah sat front row alongside the Mayor of London. Charlotte Tilbury handled backstage beauty. Norman Jay MBE DJ'd the afterparty. The whole thing felt more like a cultural event than a marketing activation.

Before the major relaunch, they partnered with artist Russ Jones to hide 21 custom mirror installations across Soho, a treasure hunt that generated organic social content and positioned the brand as culturally plugged in without requiring a media buy. They ran a pop-up with indie record label Defected Records, blending retail with cocktails, makeovers and live DJs. Cara Delevingne was announced as brand ambassador, with a 40-piece edit and a full capsule collection to follow. An open casting with Wilhelmina Models gave unsigned talent the chance to walk the show.

Every single activation here is brand building, delivered through earned and social channels rather than paid broadcast.

Borrowed reach is still reach

The evidence base on how brands grow is well-established: penetration matters more than loyalty, and reaching light and non-buyers at scale is the primary driver of market share. Topshop is achieving exactly that, through means other than media spend.

Instead of investing in standalone stores, they launched in 32 John Lewis locations last week, with earlier pop-ups generating what John Lewis's director of fashion Rachel Morgans called 'sellout successes' within two weeks of opening. The Topshop announcement became John Lewis's most popular fashion post on Instagram for the entire year. Wholesale partnerships with Printemps in France and department store concessions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and Miami extend the footprint further.

This is borrowed reach: using other brands' platforms, physical presence and customer bases to extend your own. It puts Topshop in front of people who were not looking for them, in contexts that reinforce the brand's positioning. That is mass reach, achieved without a bought media plan.

John Lewis's Peter Ruis put it well: 'I think the best fashion brands are multigenerational.' The partnership exposes Topshop to parents shopping alongside their children, exactly the kind of light and non-buyers that Ehrenberg-Bass principles say you need to reach.

If you are a marketing leader at a mid-to-large brand, this is worth sitting with. Your route to audiences beyond your existing base does not have to run through a media plan. Distribution partnerships, retail concessions, co-branded activations and cultural moments can achieve the same breadth of reach, often with stronger context and lower cost.

Where the Unilever model gets dangerous

The risk with Fernandez's approach is not the channel shift. It is the assumption that shifting spend into creators automatically produces brand outcomes.

The data suggests otherwise. A CreativeX analysis of 1.6 million ads found that 45% of creator ad spend on Meta failed to deliver brand impact, largely because branding was absent from the first three seconds. Kantar data shows only 27% of creator content effectively links to the sponsoring brand. When you combine those numbers with a target of 50% creator allocation across a nearly €10bn marketing budget, the waste potential is enormous.

Creators are a distribution channel. The danger lies in treating creator content as a category rather than holding it to the same strategic standard as any other brand investment.

And this is where boardroom pressure becomes a factor. NIQ's CMO Outlook, surveying more than 250 marketing leaders across 14 countries, reports that only 69% of CMOs say their CEO and CFO believe in the value of long-term brand building, a sharp decline from 80% the year before. Budget allocation to long-term brand building has slipped from 59% to 55%, and 84% of CMOs now cite ROI as their primary metric for budget decisions. The squeeze is real: the people who control the budgets are pulling toward short-term attribution, and a 'social-first' mandate from the CEO, however well-intentioned, risks accelerating that drift. If creator spend becomes the default line item that boards treat as 'performance', the long-term brand investment it was supposed to fund gets quietly hollowed out.

The discipline that makes it work

What makes Topshop instructive is the discipline it demonstrates, a discipline the Unilever model does not yet account for. Every activation earns its keep across multiple dimensions simultaneously.

The Trafalgar Square show was a brand event, a product launch (see now, buy now, with pieces available immediately on the relaunched Topshop.com), a PR moment and a social content engine. The John Lewis partnership is a distribution play, a marketing moment and a customer acquisition channel. The Defected Records pop-up was a retail experience, a brand positioning exercise and organic content fuel.

Rashid describes three strategic pillars: product, culture and community, and elevation. That is it. Three pillars, a small team with decision-making authority, and the creative discipline to make every pound work across all of them.

'We have to be mindful of how we go to market; we're going to need to be scrappy in places,' Rashid has said. 'But we have an incredible foundation of history and heritage.'

That tension between startup scrappiness and brand elevation is the model that Fernandez's approach is missing. You can be social-first and media-light and still be building brand equity. But only if brand building is the intent, not the hope.

Whether this translates into sustained market share recovery is a question only time can answer. The John Lewis launch is barely a week old and the international expansion is in its earliest stages. But the execution has been exceptional, the early commercial signals are strong, and the strategic discipline behind every decision stands out in an industry where 'social-first' too often means 'strategy-light'.

Three questions to pressure-test your own strategy

If you are leading marketing at a brand that is shifting toward social-first, creator-led or media-light execution, whether by choice or by budget pressure, there are three questions worth asking before you commit.

Is your social-first approach building brand or generating volume? Look at the work your creators are producing. Does it reinforce who you are and what you stand for? Or is it optimised for engagement metrics that do not connect back to brand positioning? The 45% waste figure on creator spend is an argument for better briefing and higher standards, not an argument against creators. Every piece of creator content should be held to the same question as a TV spot: does this make people who do not know us want to know us?

Are you reaching audiences beyond your existing base, or talking to the same people more often? Social-first approaches have a gravitational pull toward your existing community. Algorithms serve content to people who already engage with you. If your social strategy is not deliberately designed to reach people who are not following you, through partnerships, cultural moments, borrowed platforms or earned media that breaks out of your owned channels, you are deepening loyalty with buyers you already have rather than generating the penetration growth that drives the business.

Does every activation serve more than one purpose? Topshop's team operates with a fraction of the budget of a Unilever brand, and they have compensated by making every activation do quadruple duty: brand, product, PR, content. If your social-first shift means replacing one expensive TV campaign with dozens of creator posts that each serve a single purpose, you may be fragmenting your impact rather than concentrating it. The question is not how many pieces of content you are producing. It is how hard each one is working.

The real lesson

This debate will run for months. The brands that come out ahead will be the ones who move past the binary and focus on disciplined, brand-building execution through whatever channels they can afford.

Topshop has 0.19% market share and no media budget. They are building brand through social, earned and partnership channels, and doing a blinding job of it. Brand is the intent behind every decision, with social and earned channels as the means of delivery.

That distinction is everything. And it is the one that matters for your next budget conversation.

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Amar Chohan, Founder and CEO - Department of Creative Affairs.