The number sounds like a misprint, or perhaps something dreamed up by a marketing executive who had recently watched a documentary about army ants. But Unilever insists it is real: the consumer goods giant says it now works with approximately 300,000 creators around the world, a figure so large that it seems to demand not just a strategy but a logistics division.

Fernando Fernández, the chief executive of Unilever, has credited this creator army with helping drive the company's growth, a declaration that prompted the trade publication Digiday to ask the obvious question: How does one actually manage 300,000 people who are not technically employees?

The answer, it turns out, is complicated.

"The management model varied depending on the campaign, creator and market," said Ryu Yokoi, the company's chief media and marketing capability officer, in what might be described as a statement designed to survive close reading without revealing much.

Unilever, which owns brands including Dove, Axe and Hellmann's, said the program is run through a combination of in-house teams, agency partnerships and experiential programs. It declined to provide details beyond that. The company did note that the network is not new — it has been building what Mr. Yokoi called "creator-first marketing" for years — and that it tested the approach during the recent World Cup, deploying 50,000 creators with a combined audience of more than 600 million people.

(Whether anyone can truly be said to "work with" 50,000 people at once is perhaps a philosophical question best left to labor theorists and Burning Man organizers.)

Several agency executives expressed polite skepticism about the scale, wondering whether the 300,000 figure represents an active roster or something closer to a database one might scroll through like a very long Netflix queue. Olivia Ormos, founder of the creator marketing platform MAVN, suggested the number itself might be the point: a signal to competitors that Unilever intends to dominate the space.

There are practical concerns as well. Gabe Feldman, a co-founder of The Now Agency, noted that managing creators at this scale requires "immense operational lift" — vetting, contracting, briefing, reviewing — and that automation, while helpful, has limits. The risk, he said, is that algorithmic sourcing keeps surfacing the same creators, producing campaigns that feel interchangeable.

"It could be a race to the mean," said Brad Hoos, chief executive of the influencer agency The Outloud Group.

Leandro Barreto, Unilever's chief marketing officer for beauty and wellbeing, acknowledged that not all creators are alike, which is perhaps the sort of observation that becomes necessary when one has 300,000 of them.

"It's very different to work with a creator with 300 million followers and work with the other 150,000 with 1,000 followers," Mr. Barreto said at the Cannes Lions festival.

This is undeniably true, in the way that it is different to host a dinner party for six and a dinner party for the population of Akron.

Original story published in Digiday: "Inside Unilever's 300,000 creator network: the logistics behind the headline number"