Clorox aims to make the majority of its marketing personalized.
Clorox Co. is consolidating U.S. creative assignments with Interpublic’s FCB, adding Burt’s Bees, Kingsford, Fresh Step and Brita assignments to the Clorox, Hidden Valley, Glad and other brand assignments the agency already had.
The moves come as Clorox pushes hard to make the majority of its marketing personalized and recover from a series of disruptions starting with the pandemic and, most recently, a massive cyberattack that led to a double-digit sales decline in the quarter ended Sept. 30.
Dentsu Creative had previously handled Burt’s Bees, Kingsford, Fresh Step and Brita since a comprehensive review in 2016, after which Dentsu and the former McGarryBowen shop (subsequently merged into Dentsu) shared duties across Clorox with FCB. Dentsu referred calls to Clorox for comment.
Omnicom Media Group’s OMD continues to handle media for Clorox in the U.S. and, via a consolidation begun earlier this year, internationally. The goal is to apply what OMD has done in the U.S. in such areas as personalization to overseas markets.
Brands moving to FCB had spending of $69 million in 2022 and $42 million through the first half of 2023, according to Vivvix, with paid social data from Pathmatics. Overall, Clorox spent $284 million in 2022 and $162.3 million in the first half of 2023, per Vivvix and Pathmatics.
Globally, Clorox reported $734 million in advertising spending for its fiscal year ended June 30.
Clorox has generally spent in the 10% to 11% range of net sales globally on advertising, and expects to spend around 11% for this fiscal year, which ends June 30, said Chief Marketing Officer Eric Schwartz. That means a ramp up in spending in the back half of the fiscal year, starting in January, following the disruption brought on by product supply shortages from the cyberattack.
The moves are meant to align with Clorox’s aggressive shift toward marketing personalization. And they aim to help the company move past a particularly turbulent time.
Like its peers, Clorox has been managing through the impact of the pandemic, which drove a huge spike in sales and widespread shortages of its household cleaning products, particularly Clorox Wipes. That was followed by the double whammy of difficult comparisons and rising prices to recoup a spike in raw materials costs.
Clorox also struggled with the cyberattack on the company’s supply chain in August that led to a 20% decline in net sales, or a drop of $356 million, in the fiscal first quarter ended Sept. 30.
The agency moves weren’t driven by that, but they are meant to make it easier for Clorox to expand its use of personalization, Schwartz said in an interview. Currently, more than half the company’s marketing is personalized, he said, with a goal of reaching 70%. And the company now has more than 100 million known U.S. consumers in its first-party database, part of an outgrowth of a multiyear $500 million investment in marketing tech stack and capabilities.
The agency realignment is the first Clorox has done broadly since 2016, when the company consolidated work with FCB, Dentsu and Dentsu’s McGarryBowen. FCB added to its assignments in subsequent years, including picking up work on Hidden Valley Ranch in 2022.
Burt’s Bees work had moved to FCB recently following a review, with the remaining U.S. creative assignments moving to FCB effective in January, Schwartz said. Dentsu continues to handle some Clorox brands in Canada.
Burt’s Bees stands out as a brand led by social and digital media, and FCB demonstrated through the review that it could be the lead on such an account, he said. Ultimately, those capabilities also helped the agency win the additional assignments as Clorox made the decisions on those brands without a review.
“We first began working with Clorox in 2016 and over the years have developed a highly effective partnership with an incredible team of people, led out of our Chicago office,” said Tyler Turnbull, FCB’s global CEO, in a statement. “We’re excited for this new expanded relationship and to continue to help Clorox transform their marketing to deliver on the needs of both today’s and tomorrow’s consumer.”
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FCB, Schwartz said, has been “our most successful partner in driving what we call ‘bigger, stickier platforms.’ We use that term to talk about innovation and about communication platforms.”
Hidden Valley’s “serious flavor” work is one example of that. FCB also had grown beyond its original 2016 remit with a Fresh Step “Adopt a Stray” program last year that grew from a promotion into a broader platform effort.
“They’ve shown they can really flex different muscles for different businesses,” Schwartz said. “Not just in our current business, but on a future piece of business.”
FCB also has shown “the ability to show up on futures-oriented things, whether it’s multicultural, social, digital or generative AI, and thinking about the flexibility of production and how we work best together in an evolving world of technological capability,” he said. “My philosophy is, as we consolidate with successful partners, we also enable our ability to change.”
AI is part of that change, Schwartz said. “Gen AI has gone through a transformative phase change, he said. “Application of that enhancement to our creative processes is an area of active exploration as well with partners. We are certainly focused on accelerating our ability to make complex decisions instead of singular decisions, so we can be more hyper-personalized for the consumer and show up in a way that’s more relevant.”
If the past three years have shown nothing else, it’s that Clorox needs to be ready to adapt and change rapidly.
“During the pandemic, during the phase of hyperinflation, and then more recently during the cyberattack, we’ve been forced to change by an externally driven environment,” Schwartz said. “The silver lining is that we’ve gotten pretty good at change and adaptation. We’re setting ourselves up with the internal capability to change. What we do with it next is up to us, and we’re excited about what’s possible with partnerships, like with the FCB partnership.”
