Claravine

Colgate-Palmolive Unifies Agency Data for Better Advertising Insights

Colgate-Palmolive launched a global data harmonization program to unify how its agencies report media and product metadata. Led by Mark Zomick, the brand’s senior product manager for global information systems (joined in 2021), the initiative sought to standardize data feeds across its main global agency WPP and regional shops. The project employed Claravine to establish a unified taxonomy, improving naming consistency from 20% standardized to 95% after about a year, and now approaching full standardization. WPP supported the effort, while smaller agencies complied to retain advertising budgets. Agencies that did not align with the standards were effectively excluded from media plans. The program emphasizes metadata and digital media initially, with plans to formalize creative naming and leverage AI-driven metadata in planning, including potential alignment with platform AI ad products like Google Performance Max, Amazon Performance Plus, and Meta Advantage+ Shopping Campaigns.

Content Overload: AI's Data Dilemma for Marketers

Generative AI’s rapid growth is creating content overload and data-management obstacles for marketing, analytics, and ad operations teams. The piece notes that ChatGPT amassed over 100 million active users within four months and captured nearly half of Bing’s unique visitors in its first month, highlighting AI’s outsized impact on search. Snowflake has rolled out capabilities to bring generative AI and large language models directly to customers’ proprietary data on a single secure platform, underscoring a shift toward AI-driven data access. As content and assets proliferate, metadata quality, naming conventions, and consistent data governance become critical to AI effectiveness, with the American Marketing Association citing 90% of marketing materials go unused due to irrelevance or being out of date. Gartner finds poor data quality costs organizations about $12.9 million annually, and Forrester reports teams waste about 2.4 hours per day searching for the right data. The article cautions that measurement and attribution may lag without better data management as AI use grows.

Ad Revenue Growth Slows Amid Shift to Retail Media

AdExchanger’s Tuesday news roundup highlights Magna's downgrade of its 2023 global ad spend forecast to 4.6% growth, with total ad revenue projected at $842 billion. Digital ad sales are expected to rise 8.5% to $577 billion (69% of all ad sales), while retail media networks grow 12% to $121 billion, driven by ecommerce and product-search spend. The piece notes marketers reallocating budgets from trade marketing to retail media, and US ad spend forecast to grow 2.5% to $333 billion in 2023, with a 7.3% rise anticipated in 2024 as the economy recovers and political ads return. In retail TV, NBCUniversal will test Peacock inventory via Walmart Connect DSP to measure impact on online and in-store sales, with Roku and TikTok having similar Walmart-related shoppable ads. Separately, Claravine is acquiring Netra for an undisclosed sum to bolster AI-driven metadata classification; Disney CFO Christine McCarthy is stepping down.