Buying digital media across platforms challenges even the most experienced advertisers, so global packaged goods player Reckitt and other marketers are adopting a new tool designed to provide a clearer understanding and control over their digital media.

Among the issues that have long plagued digital media buying are inconsistencies in how social platforms define and measure audiences, the myriad of confusing options for opting into or out of partner networks, and the challenges of controlling ad frequency and managing brand safety.

After many years of trying to manage all this on its own, Reckitt has adopted a third-party system from Adfidence whose goal is to fix some of these problems. Reckitt has joined a dozen other consumer packaged goods companies and healthcare players globally in adopting or piloting the system, mostly within the past year.

Reckitt, which markets such brands as Mucinex, Lysol, Air Wick and Finish, already had playbooks for successful digital media buying when Sameer Amin came into his role as global director of data-driven marketing and media at the company in 2018. “But we realized there was no real way of seeing if markets were applying it,” he said.

The only real way then was to manually get data from each country or region and then apply it against scorecards, Amin said. “We realized this was not a sustainable way of doing it.”

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The next step was developing a proprietary Reckitt system that, for example, would send alerts to marketers and agencies when brands breached bid caps in buying media and would score teams on how well they performed against best practice benchmarks. That worked better than doing things manually, Amin said, but not well enough.

“Even though intentions were good, there were unintended consequences,” he said. Frequency cap data, for example, came back as an average across campaigns, meaning the overall number might be fine, but because one campaign was under the target and another was over, neither really hit the mark.

Amin said he was impressed by Adfidence’s ability to look at Reckitt’s system and show how it could work better, ultimately leading him to adopt its platform to replace Reckitt’s.

When measures such as campaign frequency start moving outside of targets, Adfidence “tells you exactly what you need to fix,” Amin said. “We’re now working with them on campaign setup, to be proactive rather than reactive.” Less than a year in, he said the results are promising.

Jacek Chrusciany, a veteran of Procter & Gamble Co. brand management based in Poland, began developing Adfidence in 2022. Chrusciany has brought the digital campaign governance tool to Galderma (globally), Kimberly-Clark Corp. (which began using it in the U.S. and now is piloting it in three more regions), PepsiCo (in Europe), Mattel and Bayer (both of them in Europe, the Middle East and Africa). Adfidence also has more than a half dozen additional pilots with packaged goods companies, Chrusciany said.

The impetus behind Adfidence, Chrusciany said, were observations beginning with his P&G marketing days more than a decade ago, bolstered by more than 18 years of experience with the Polish agency Performance Media.

Among examples of confusion he encountered were controls for managing Google partner campaigns, which involve checking a relatively obscure box to opt out of default inclusion in the media giant’s search and video partner networks. Nearly every platform has different settings for such partner opt-ins or opt-outs, building audiences, capping frequency, setting brand safety standards and measuring results, Chrusciany said.

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“Buying media today, everything is done through platforms, which look like the cockpit of a plane,” he said. “When you tweak, it’s a manual process with plenty of mistakes, and often not clear alignment between an advertiser and an agency or in-housing team. It’s the biggest blind spot in media.”

The idea for Adfidence is a single campaign governance tool for making all decisions across platforms and accumulating post-campaign data for standardized evaluation based on performance indicators brands choose, be it sales, brand lift scores or other response data.

Chrusciany said he’s working directly with advertisers, but in most cases they’re applying Adfidence in concert with media agencies.

While Adfidence appears to be gaining traction rapidly with CPG marketers in particular, it’s not the only such tool out there. Agencies have in some cases built similar products for use with clients.

Digital performance marketing agency Wpromote, which handles buying for a range of clients from mid-size to Fortune 500 companies across multiple categories, uses a proprietary tool called Polaris, which overlays the agency’s marketing mix model on top of data from platforms, said David Dweck, senior VP of paid media.

“It is complicated,” Dweck said of cross-platform campaigns. “Everybody has different rules, different opt-ins, different boxes to check. Having a single platform is very advantageous. It allows us to tag everything in a unified way, to make sure the right metrics are coming in from all the platforms.”