Kimberly-Clark and its’ trusted brands are an indispensable part of life for more than one-quarter of the world’s population. But emerging factors threatened the value of the underlying consumer insights and signals that have been the fuel for this innovation.
Kimberly-Clark and its’ trusted brands are an indispensable part of life for more than one-quarter of the world’s population. Fueled by ingenuity, creativity, and an understanding of people’s most essential needs, for more than 150 years, Kimberly-Clark has created products that help individuals experience more of what’s important to them.
But emerging factors threatened the value of the underlying consumer insights and signals that have been the fuel for this innovation. Global data privacy regulations including GDPR and CPRA, the declining support of third-party behavioral cookies, and the lack of access to direct retail data about new shopper behaviors and preferences … these all created rising barriers to truly understand and address consumer needs.
Even more frustrating, these challenges arose at the same time that cloud technologies promised even more power to build predictive models with machine learning, to handle huge data sets with scalable storage, and to build and execute large analytic queries that were previously out of reach of local servers.
Together with Kimberly-Clark, Mindshare helped evaluate and support solutions to this challenge.
Mindshare, Kimberly-Clark’s agency of record and global media agency that is part of GroupM and WPP, has an expert perspective on best practices and emergent trends in consumer media, audience modeling, data science and data privacy. Mindshare offers strategic and hands-on-keyboard support to roll out the set of solutions needed to keep Kimberly-Clark at the forefront of insight-driven innovation.
Instead of relying on the limitations of off- the-shelf solutions, Kimberly-Clark chose an extensible data architecture that could adapt to consumer shifts, market disruptions, and increasing operational access throughout the organization.
Kimberly-Clark selected the Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as its cloud foundation, centered on Big Query and its supporting tools and libraries to power the central cloud data warehouse.
“Driving our focus on the consumer, day in and day out, and being able to test that, is a testament to the journey we’re on and where we’re going, because we can’t always know what will happen next.” – Jason Niemi, Global Technology Director, Kimberly-Clark
LiveRamp Safe Haven, its privacy-first data collaboration platform, was deployed on top of GCP to create a consumer data workspace focused on privacy-conscious data connectivity, audience modeling, media measurement and data collaboration using LiveRamp’s identity frameworks. The data protections of Safe Haven were also instrumental for enabling detailed access to rich layers of transactional data from retail partners.
Mindshare supported Kimberly-Clark’s visionary solution through all phases of testing and rollout, with three key responsibilities:
Technology Evolution to ensure that the best options were selected to create powerful identity-resolved analytics without exposing sensitive personally-identifiable consumer information, ensuring that growth would stay compliant with global privacy regulations.
Data Ecosystem Buildout to shift how Kimberly-Clark partners with data providers, to eliminate third-party black box audience models, and to place more control and transparency in the hands of Kimberly-Clark’s own internal teams. This created a newly enriched post-cookie data ecosystem supported by accurate consumer and retail transaction signals to understand product affinities and cohorts, while also enabling advanced analytics for path to purchase.
Person-Based Activation and Strategy to leverage both first-party and second-party insights, unlocking contextual targeting opportunities and channel performance optimization across segments.
Kimberly-Clark’s goal to consolidate and deepen consumer insights is an ongoing journey. However, post-cookie activation, audience modeling, and omni-channel measurement have proven rich with cost savings due to standardizing data workflows and identifying new ways to license data assets directly into the Safe Haven platform for analytics, insights, and targeting.
The consolidation of data led to streamlining internal processes for modeling and reporting, uncovering talent efficiencies; for example, transparency and control over end-to-end data processing has currently yielded 30% FTE time savings.
Most significantly, this new solution has served as a clarifying foundation for directing business transformation within Kimberly-Clark, highlighting the importance of upskilling existing talent to master the powerful data infrastructure. With this business evolution, deep and accurate consumer understanding once again fuels Kimberly-Clark innovation for generations to come.