Colgate-Palmolive's Path to Global Data Consistency

Colgate-Palmolive, a global powerhouse in oral care, personal care, home care, and pet nutrition, has a massive product portfolio and an equally vast marketing footprint — the company runs hundreds of campaigns annually, generating extensive media and CRM data.

With operations in over 200 countries and thousands of marketers and agencies working across regions, Colgate-Palmolive’s data ecosystem was anything but simple. Despite efforts to implement a unified brand taxonomy, each team had its own interpretation, leading to inconsistent structures, mismatched data, and reporting gaps. As Colgate-Palmolive invested in a global media activity reporting tool, the full scale of the issue became clear: 20,000+ campaigns and 100,000+ placements tracked annually, regional data silos blocking full-funnel visibility, and manual data cleanup slowing insights and decision-making.

To unlock the full value of its marketing data, Colgate-Palmolive needed a common data language that worked across every region, agency, and platform.

The Challenge: Complex Data, Many Massive Teams

Colgate-Palmolive’s data structure had evolved independently across regions, leading to fragmented reporting and disconnected insights. Despite efforts to implement a standardized brand taxonomy, agency teams managed data independently, making it difficult to align campaigns across markets. Without a common data language, teams struggled with mismatched taxonomies across global markets, time-consuming manual data cleanup to align reports, inconsistent full-funnel campaign tracking, and delays in granular reporting and advanced analytics.

We find ourselves constantly fixing metadata in our reporting. It was manual and time consuming. Our reporting was always able to tell us how we did…but we still didn’t know how we were doing. Our analytics was limited.

To fully unlock the value of its global data, Colgate-Palmolive needed a single source of truth — one that could bridge the gap between regional teams and global reporting.

The Solution: An Agnostic, Workflow-Friendly Rollout

To ensure a smooth and seamless rollout across global teams, Colgate-Palmolive and WPP turned to The Data Standards Cloud — an agnostic solution designed to integrate directly into existing systems without disrupting the established workflows. This approach lets each team operate in their familiar environments — whether launching, tracking, or reporting on campaigns — while the Claravine platform captures all data in the background.

Rolling out a new global data standard is one thing — getting thousands of advertisers to follow it is another. The biggest challenge wasn’t just structuring data correctly, but doing so without disrupting how campaigns were built and launched. Having tested The Data Standards Cloud for internal agency workflows, WPP was eager to roll out a data standards framework across an enterprise brand. Advertisers and agency teams needed a frictionless solution that would embed directly into their existing workflows, ensure compliance without added complexity, make standardization feel effortless, and unify past marketing data.

Once the technology foundation was in place, the next critical step was to create a centralized global taxonomy — one that could work across all regions and agency teams. Rather than dictating a rigid, top-down solution, Colgate-Palmolive built a dedicated Central Taxonomy Team to bridge the gap between brand and agency teams. The team worked closely together to map out real-world campaign workflows, gain buy-in from all stakeholders, develop a shared data language aligned with existing processes, and manage the taxonomy on an ongoing basis — continuously refining it to address new requests and evolving needs. By structuring the taxonomy around how teams already operated, Colgate-Palmolive eliminated friction, creating a framework that felt seamless and natural rather than forced.

The Results: Agency Data Compliance from 20% to Nearly 100%

Within just a few months, Colgate-Palmolive saw a significant jump in their agencies’ data compliance, increasing from 20% to nearly 100%. Driven by their top agency WPP, this remarkable improvement significantly enhanced the consistency and accuracy of campaign data across the board. Beyond compliance, this also unlocked new insights — previously, the brand could only report on basic metrics like market, brand, channel, and vendor/platform. Now they have access to richer data, including insights into the brand plan, target audience, goals, and the bigger picture of campaign performance — available in real time, eliminating the delays of reporting weeks later.

The platform also facilitated the cleanup and unification of Colgate’s historical campaign data, which had previously been fragmented and difficult to measure. The Taxonomy Team could now identify areas for reconciliation and gather better metrics for future initiatives — and start mapping a new, more efficient process to improve campaign execution moving forward.

Bi-directional data flows between Claravine’s platform and campaign management tools like Google Display & Video 360 and Campaign Manager 360 made it easier for teams to work within their familiar systems while benefiting from automated data validation. Real-time checks on data inputs allowed teams to make corrections before campaign launches, while also providing opportunities to enrich data with detailed metadata for more granular reporting and insights.

Looking Ahead: Maximizing Content & Creative Assets

Colgate is committed to advancing its metadata management practices, with plans to improve tagging, organization, and utilization of content by leveraging Claravine’s AI capabilities. The goal is to strengthen their personalized content engine by implementing a dynamic Content ID across all assets, ensuring each piece is trackable and aligned with campaign goals. Colgate envisions a future where data is 100% accurate, fully actionable, and empowers teams to make confident, data-driven decisions with precision across all campaigns.