What you need to know:

• Consumer goods multinational Reckitt Benckiser has in-housed its digital media buying team in Australia, carving it out of its work with Publicis’ media shop Zenith in a bid to use data better and manage consumer experience.
• Reckitt Hygiene ANZ Marketing Director Florence Paoli says it is part of a bigger shift that goes beyond marketing to broader digital transformation.
• The company is moving towards a 50-50 share between television and digital media, with Zenith retaining the non-digital media spend.
• Creative will continue to be outsourced – rather, CX and digital media will be done in-house.

Cleaning house

One of Australia’s largest advertisers, consumer goods company Reckitt Benckiser, has taken its digital media buying in-house from Publicis’ Zenith in a bid to control data more tightly and better manage consumers’ interactions with its brands.

The company splits its marketing function into Health and Hygiene verticals, and has added at least four digital media buying roles to Hygiene's broader marketing team, now 25-strong. The Hygiene team covers brands like Air Wick, Aerogard, Harpic, Glen20, Finish and Vanish.

“Digital transformation is one of the biggest opportunities we have. And it’s not just a marketing thing. It is really about this competitive edge. We will need it to win in the future and to win already today,” Reckitt Hygiene ANZ Marketing Director, Florence Paoli, said.

“For us, it's about consistency. That's the beauty of having dedicated resources in-house. They live and breathe the brand as the rest of the marketing team. The idea is you as a consumer, when you come across one of my brands – whatever the touch points, you need to get a consistent message, you need to get the same quality experience. It's a really big deal for us in Reckitt.”

Paoli took over the Hygiene team in March from Saurabh Jain, who moved to India as Regional Marketing Director. In February, he said Covid had given the Hygiene team a snapshot of almost all of the potential buyers of its cleaning products, which it then used to re-target them to great success. Paoli had been global brand marketing manager at Harpic, and has been at Reckitt for more than a decade.

Over the past week, Reckitt’s digital team has started to buy media for the Hygiene brands. The brand is aiming for a roughly 50-50 split between its digital buying and other media spend.

Reckitt is known in the industry as a mass media player, buying volume at bargain basement prices. It’s understood Zenith will continue to plan Reckitt’s media, and buy across partnerships, out of home, radio and television, but it won’t buy digital. A spokesperson for Zenith referred Mi3 to Reckitt for comment.

While the Health vertical launched its own internal creative studio a few years ago, there are currently no plans for the Hygiene side. It used Host/Havas creative for an Aerogard campaign last year.

“We still work super closely with our creative partners. We absolutely value their creative input. We have then the [Customer Experience] CX in house, so they drive the digital strategy. And now what we are bringing in-house is the digital media buy,” Paoli said.

“Zenith was and remains a key partner for us. That is undisputed. We still very much value the relationship we have with them. It wasn't a surprise. We've been working with them for quite a long time preparing for that change. It's really something that we've done in partnership with them. TV remains with them, and we very much leverage their expertise in that space.”

Why in-house?

There is a pendulum of brands moving work in-house or looking for external expertise. Treasury Wine Estates recently announced its internal agency of 20 people linking creative, content and digital media, citing agility as its core motivation.

For Reckitt, however, data and owning the customer’s experience are the two key drivers. Reckitt doesn’t sell directly to consumers, and so doesn’t usually own the first-party purchase data. A significant part of its budget is spent promoting its key brands. It wants to be able to knit the interactions consumers have with the brand together through data. 

“Data is king. Data is the bread and butter of every marketeer already. So what data am I getting? What am I doing with it? And what's my longer-term plan to actually impact performance?” Paoli said.

“We can already see that some of the content that we've optimised for digital is already running a much higher [return on investment] than the content that we might have run before. So we're learning, we're investing, and now we're tracking it also very closely.”

A key challenge with in-housing a digital team is maintaining the skills that agencies argue are constantly honed and sharpened across multiple clients. Paoli says upskilling the wider business on terminology and digital practices will help alleviate that.

“This is not a team that stands alone. It's all about integration. And that's where we see the best value of that team. And that's why I really wanted them to be part of the brand teams. They need to be, first and foremost, consumer centric, know their brand inside out, and then add the digital lens. And I think that's where we're seeing it work the best,” she said.

“It is really about upskilling – not just marketing, but everyone – on that terminology. We discussed, obviously bringing new head counts within the brand team with that special digital focus… we've also invested in some tools, so dashboards and trackers, so that we get much more in detail into what's driving our performance.”

Impending changes to Australia's privacy laws are top of Paoli’s mind, but this move is about improving understanding of Reckitt's customers' behaviour.

“Safety and security is at the forefront of our digital strategy. We take the new regulations extremely seriously, protecting our consumers privacy, and it's a big company's commitment as well,” she said.

“But it's invaluable for us to understand the consumer behaviours, the exact journey, the touch points, et cetera. And so that's exactly why we're doing this."