Advertising Age reported Clorox consolidated its US creative accounts
with White advertising agency FCB, reassigning a few brands previously
handled by Dentsu Creative. Hey, Clorox is known for its whitening capabilities—but
in this case, time will tell if the brand experiences brighter and less stinky
results.
Clorox
Consolidates US Creative Accounts With FCB
The IPG agency
already worked on Clorox, Hidden Valley, Glad and other brands
By Jack Neff
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.
Preparing
for change
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.
First
creative realignment since 2016
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.”
‘Bigger,
stickier platforms’
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.”
