Whoever coined the term about herding cats probably knew what it was like trying to get dozens of ad agency partners around the world to work together.
Mark Zomick, Colgate-Palmolive’s senior product manager for global information systems, spent most of his career at agencies, including at GroupM and Zenith, before moving to the brand side.
“One of the things you learn is that nothing at an agency ever happens unless a client is driving it or demands it at the very least,” said Zomick, whose job also involves paid media analytics.
Zomick brought this attitude with him when he joined Colgate-Palmolive in 2021 with a mandate to “harmonize” all of its data feeds and ad reporting systems around the world, including from WPP, its main global agency, as well as numerous regional or boutique shops.
It was no small task, he said.
Even standards that seem simple in concept – having every agency use the same terms and metadata to describe Colgate-Palmolive’s vast portfolio of products and franchises, for example – is a difficult proposition. Account execs and creative teams have their own personal taxonomies for naming files and describing products.
Meanwhile, some agencies manually assemble media reports, meaning they might be the only ones who know which wrong values they need to correct in a report in the case of an error.
And non-English agencies also must adopt Colgate-Palmolive’s native tongue. “Tradicional” is close, Zomick said, but any agency using that as a keyword or marketing description has to use the English “traditional” for everything to align.
When these sorts of processes happen manually at agencies around the world, it throws automated reporting for a loop, Zomick said.
“We’re buying our media one nickel at a time,” he said, “and we need to track it one nickel at a time.”
Herding agencies
So how did Colgate-Palmolive get its global agency roster in line?
First, it contracted with metadata and data standards vendor Claravine to help establish a taxonomy that every agency in Colgate-Palmolive’s roster must put in practice.
When Colgate-Palmolive began working with Claravine, only 20% of its campaign names and marketing terms were standardized, Zomick said, meaning “80% of the campaign names needed to be remapped manually after the fact to do our reporting.”
After a year, around 95% of its names and terms were standardized, and now that number is practically 100%.
It was also helpful that WPP, Colgate-Palmolive’s primary global agency, was committed to the change. It was a pain in WPP’s butt when different regional markets didn’t sync for media reporting.
And smaller agencies were on board, Zomick said, because a big client like Colgate-Palmolive generally has a lot of sway. “[They] realized that unless they were able to conform to the proper standards, they weren’t going to get a seat at the adult table in terms of the money being laid out,” he said.
Colgate-Palmolive’s analytics and attribution are based on the standardized reporting coming in from its agencies, meaning agencies that don’t standardize are left off media plans, Zomick said.
What’s next for Colgate-Palmolive’s standards
But the standardization process isn’t a “set it and forget it” affair, he said.
The program requires constant upkeep, and there are still parts of Colgate-Palmolive’s marketing analytics that haven’t yet incorporated the new standards.
So far, it’s chosen to focus on the low-hanging fruit of digital ad buying. “Our next big step of this is creative naming [standards],” Zomick said.
For instance, AI solutions now allow metadata to be incorporated into ad planning, according to Claravine CRO E.J. Freni. Rather than confusingly long file names like “boy_blue_v2_edit_final,” generative AI solutions are great at filling in a rich metadata description of what appears in an ad, what product it’s for, the sentiment and more.
Drilling down into what actually drives performance should become much easier with richer metadata.
One problem Colgate-Palmolive has faced, Zomick said, is disentangling which creative assets around the world feature different celebrities or endorsed talent. It’s not searchable in any consistent way, and going through creative manually would be a nightmare. Generative AI could easily solve this by incorporating that info into campaign reporting and metadata from the start.
These data taxonomy standards will also likely pay dividends when used with new platform AI ad products, like Google’s Performance Max, Amazon Performance Plus and Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.
