Colgate-Palmolive embraces CTV and sees a 19 percent upswing in incremental reach

Colgate-Palmolive’s challenge when activating connected TV was how to embrace the growing media channel without inundating consumers, but rather maximizing a holistic brand experience for them, according to Jeff Giacchetti, the company’s programmatic media lead.

Colgate successfully achieved that. Working with The Trade Desk, Colgate increased incremental reach by 19 percent and achieved a 58 percent unique reach on its initial CTV campaigns, Giacchetti said during a webinar hosted by the ANA.

“We also helped level the frequency we were getting from our linear buy,” he said. “These results were eye-opening for us. It really helped to throttle our evolving CTV strategy.”

The results were so promising, in fact, that Colgate has made CTV a permanent part of its media mix.

Embracing CTV
A former GroupM and Publicis Groupe digital media exec, Giacchetti went brand side in 2017, leading digital transformation for Henkel’s Laundry & Home Care division. He later joined Colgate in 2020 to accelerate the company’s programmatic media practice as the North America subject matter expert (SME). Among his chief priorities was merging linear TV and CTV strategies for Colgate’s many brands. “Our audiences are moving to CTV and they’re moving there rapidly,” he said during the panel.

Giacchetti was concerned about serving too many ads to consumers and having it negatively affect brand perception. “The last thing we want to do is bombard our consumers with too much frequency,” Giacchetti said. “Ask anyone what their experience is with CTV, they will tell you there's a preponderance of ads. They see too many ads from a single brand in too short of a period of time, and that’s damaging for a brand.”

Colgate partnered with The Trade Desk largely because The Trade Desk offers measurement tools that allow for frequency controls and to optimize campaigns for unique household reach.

Colgate has recently tested a portion of their fluidity buys — campaigns that span both linear and connected television — on The Trade Desk due to the high performance of the test campaign. Based on past results, the company is hopeful to achieve similar incremental reach.

‘Crawl, walk, run’
One of the keys to a successful CTV strategy is to make sure the linear and digital video teams at a brand work together closely, Giacchetti recommended. “It’s always a challenge to manage, let alone unify, linear and connected TV,” he said. Linear TV teams tend to approach with a content-first mindset; whereas digital video teams typically take an audience-first approach to advertising. Combining those two mindsets against a single shared media objective is critical. Emily Knight, senior director of business development at The Trade Desk, advocated for a “crawl, walk, run” approach for brands exploring CTV. The process should begin with identifying a brand’s goals, and working backwards from there to develop a CTV strategy, she said.

Once brands see how effective CTV can be in terms of generating incremental reach, they will likely continue investing in the channel.

“Colgate is now using CTV as an evergreen channel,” Giacchetti said. “We're starting to understand better the role it plays in marketing mix across our diverse portfolio.”