You don’t need an in-house marketing mix model to know that people buy toilet paper. But you do if you want to see firsthand which parts of your media plan are working and which deserve to get flushed.
At Georgia-Pacific, one of the leading global manufacturers of tissue, pulp, toilet paper and packaging products, Javier Bustillos is the one charged with answering that question. He runs national media and marketing analytics for brands like Angel Soft, Brawny, Dixie, Quilted Northern and Vanity Fair.
His remit grew out of a familiar problem: rising digital costs and not enough visibility into where the money was going.
“Back in 2019, we were working with a media agency that was handling our digital media,” Bustillos told AdExchanger. “We were significantly increasing our investments in digital media, but we didn’t have transparency on all of the fees that we were paying.”
It was a sign that the way Georgia-Pacific was set up to buy media needed to change, and that if it wanted real control over its digital spend, it couldn’t keep outsourcing the most important parts of the job.
Only easy on paper
The first step was to see what an in-house team could run on its own and whether having hands on keyboard would make the media work harder.
Bustillos and his team picked one brand and a single channel to focus on as a test.
“We started slowly,” he said. “The idea was that we’d expand if we could prove the value, not just in terms of fees, but also for media effectiveness and media cost efficiencies.”
It wasn’t a quick process. Georgia-Pacific spent nearly four years building that test into a real in-house media operation. There was plenty of technical setup to do. But a lot of the work actually had nothing to do with configuring data feeds and dashboards.
They had to think about the people.
Hiring for an in-house team means convincing programmatic traders and analytics specialists – the kind of folks who can go to an agency, a platform or a Big Tech company in Silicon Valley – to build their careers at a tissue and paper manufacturer.
“People think that by bringing media in-house they’re going to save a lot on talent by not having to pay an agency,” Bustillos said. “But the reality is that recruiting and retaining those resources is hard.”
Then there was the matter of choosing which ad tech vendors to partner with and negotiating without an agency holdco to throw its weight around.
“Getting advantageous rates is really difficult when you don’t have the scale,” Bustillos said.
To make its dollars go further, Georgia-Pacific consolidated its programmatic media spend with a small group of partners. It uses Yahoo as its primary DSP for national buys, with Google’s DV360, The Trade Desk and Amazon in the mix depending on the campaign.
With more of its buying in-house, Georgia-Pacific also wanted a clearer look under the hood, as in access to log-level data.
A lot of ad tech vendors are loath to provide that level of transparency, but Georgia-Pacific hasn’t run into that problem, Bustillos said, because it sets the expectation “up front during the contract negotiation.”
Georgia-Pacific insists on log-level data from its partners and builds regular media audits into its contracts to make sure delivery and performance match the plan.
In-house / out-house
All of which raises a natural question: What’s left for the agency?
OMD, Georgia-Pacific’s media agency of record since 2020, still leads holistic strategy and planning, Bustillos said, and handles the work where scale and relationships still matter most, like TV.
Georgia-Pacific, meanwhile, focuses on the digital channels where hands-on control and faster feedback loops make the biggest difference, from programmatic buying, search and social to marketing mix modeling, marketing analytics, A/B testing and sales lift analysis.
The in-house team now runs MMM twice a year, with plans to eventually move to a quarterly cadence and do more granular cuts based on device, audience and ad type.
But even with all that machinery in place, Bustillos readily acknowledges that not every in-housing move has been a clean win. Some channels have proved harder to crack than others, and a few early tests didn’t deliver the same lift Georgia-Pacific saw for display and online video.
Connected TV is one of those work‑in‑progress cases.
Georgia-Pacific has experimented with different CTV buying approaches, including programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals. But, as Bustillos put it, the team is “not yet at a place where we feel that we can transition 100% of CTV buying in-house,” and so it still leans on OMD’s scale during the upfronts.
It’s one reason why a hybrid model still makes sense for Georgia-Pacific, Bustillos said.
“We don’t have a vision that everything has to come in-house, and we don’t need an agency to do the same type of work we can do ourselves,” he said. “We need them to add capabilities that are complementary so that each party is bringing something unique to the table.”
