How Brands Like Clorox, Brita Build Personalization-at-Scale Frameworks
By now, most companies have recognized the value of personalized marketing and consider the practice a strategic business priority.
For The Clorox Co., whose household brands are essential supplies for millions of U.S. consumers, delivering messages that are tailored to each shopper’s individual needs is an especially critical marketing objective.
“Personalization is a part of our digital transformation and a strategic priority for Clorox because it helps our brands connect with consumers in relevant ways,” says Bailey Doyle Conlon, associate director of personalized consumer experiences at The Clorox Co. “We’ve made significant strides in scaling our efforts, with over 60% of our media now personalized, and we’ve achieved top quintile ROI in the CPG sector.”
There is no question that mature CPG companies like Clorox can produce successful personalized campaigns. But for many consumer brands, scaling such campaigns in a coordinated fashion across an ever-expanding array of channels and platforms remains a work in progress.
Despite growing investments in first-party data, marketing technology tools, AI and retail media, brands still face significant hurdles in transforming scattered efforts into a cohesive, enterprise-wide capability.
The longstanding reality that CPG marketers must rely on customer data from disparate sources — and, as a result, often struggle to obtain a unified view of shopper behavior — remains the greatest impediment to personalization at scale, says Heather Blank, senior vice president of marketing at Iterable, a software company that powers dynamic, cross-channel communication for online and brick-and-mortar brands in CPG, retail, finance, travel and hospitality.
Of course, CPGs are distinct in this regard from retailers and service categories like travel and fintech (financial technology), where companies have a direct link to their customers’ first-party data.
Still, many of the latter companies often struggle with access to data across the organization because they are working off legacy storage networks. These older systems, according to Blank, were never intended for the kind of cross-channel hyper-personalized marketing that is in great demand today.
Many CPG brands are attempting to fill gaps in the journey by increasing investments in zero-party data from sources, including consumer surveys.
“Beauty brands do this really well,” says Blank, citing campaigns that assist in finding the right color matching in exchange for data. “Brands that are newer to all this can set up their own first-party marketing plans and have an opportunity to look more at more modern solutions that can solve their data access problems faster and easier.”
Building a Stronger Data Culture, New Partnerships
In recent years, CPG marketers have taken major steps to obtain the necessary infrastructure to conduct personalized campaigns.
“We’ve invested significantly in our data technology stack, including a centralized data platform, data lake, and email service provider, which is the engine behind our personalization work,” says Doyle Conlon. “We have had great success in look-alike modeling based on our first-party data, which has helped us grow our brands, and are still working to get a unified consumer ID across platforms.”
Industry experts generally agree with this assessment.
“One of the big signs of progress we’ve seen is a mindset of, ‘Let’s get very serious about organizing and cleaning up our data sets,’” says David Staas, senior vice president of the advanced technology group at Inmar Intelligence. “They’re doing that with an eye now toward building a much stronger data culture within their organizations, which is really foundational to understanding what you can do with all of this data.”
Staas says that more brands and retailers are working together to figure out how to partner more closely on data sharing in a privacy-compliant manner, deploying new solutions and established tools such as clean rooms. “These partnerships are a win-win for both parties and help create more intelligence around the shopper to help drive that better personalization,” he added.
Brita: Personalization in Action
In October 2024, municipal water districts across the country were required by law to notify millions of residents that they might have lead in their service lines, and that each city was scheduling construction to replace aging pipes to remove the risk of lead exposure.
The troubling news nevertheless presented Clorox with an opportunity to launch a personalized marketing campaign for its Brita Elite Filter brand to deepen consumers’ understanding of how the product can remove lead from drinking water.
“We delivered contextually relevant ads alongside news content related to water contamination, reaching consumers at the precise moment of concern,” explains Bailey Doyle Conlon. “Additionally, we deployed geo-targeted ads in regions with elevated lead levels, offering reassurance through messaging that positioned the Brita Elite Filter as a trusted solution.”
These ads directed users to educational product detail pages on retailer websites, while a search campaign was deployed to capture intent-driven queries related to water quality and lead.
According to Clorox, this highly personalized, full-funnel approach resonated with consumers throughout their water filtration journey, ultimately driving a 13% lift in Brita sales.
See the Brita images below.
The area that perhaps best exemplifies this is retail media networks. Increasingly, RMN operators are expanding their reach by allowing brands to use shopper data to target audiences in other digital mediums, including connected TV (CTV).
In 2023, Dollar General Media Network introduced a partnership with Meta through which brands can reach the retailer’s more than 90 million unique customer profiles across the Meta ecosystem (via placements in Facebook and Instagram News Feeds, Stories and Reels) and close the loop with in-store sales attribution, according to Natalie Ong, senior director of operations at DG Media Network.
“Building strategic partnerships has further advanced our ability to align with the preferences of our customer base to simplify the shopper experience for the DG consumer,” says Ong. “Ultimately, personalization at scale requires retail media networks to invest in having the right foundational tech and partners, and investing in robust product feeds and databases across products, pricing, in-stocks, etc.”
Through such partnerships, RMNs hope to strengthen their role in full-funnel media and measurement approaches. For example, DG Media Network’s main point of differentiation is its ability to tap into the underserved rural communities where 80% of its stores are located.
But in order to do this, Ong says, “Teams need to ensure accurate data integration and attribution across various channels and touchpoints. One way that retail media can help facilitate this is through re-centering KPIs — that is, align channels and tactics within the full funnel of a brands’ advertising spend by connecting with vendors about the power of combining efforts to ensure brands are getting the relevancy they want across the board.”
The Impact of AI: “It’s Going to Change Everything”
While success with personalization is dependent on many factors, it is increasingly a function of how effectively marketers adopt and integrate AI into their systems. Generative AI is proving to be a boon for major pillars of personalized marketing — from data analytics to content creation, real-time ad optimization and measurement.
According to the 2025 Gartner CMO Spend survey, GenAI investments are delivering ROI through improved time efficiency (49%), cost efficiency (40%) and capacity to produce more content and/or handle more business (27%).
“With AI we can generate 8,000 versions of an ad in a matter of minutes and hyper-personalize the creative and targeting down to the individual level,” says Rob Weisberg, president of martech at Inmar. “It is my expectation that it’s going to change everything.”
Similar tactics are being deployed by platforms like Iterable in owned channels (e.g., email, SMS, organic social) at a time when many brands are prioritizing customer retention over acquisition as a way to squeeze more out of their marketing dollars.
“By automating tasks and surfacing key insights, we are freeing up marketers’ time previously spent on coding and report building, which is now minimized through conversational prompts,” says Taylor Briggs, product marketing manager at Iterable. “This allows brands to create meaningful customer moments more efficiently and achieve higher conversions and loyalty.”
Iterable is currently developing a centralized large language model that it is positioning as a “comprehensive AI assistant.” This next phase will include new GenAI tools that enable brands to go beyond simple copywriting to generating detailed marketing plans around audience segmentation, channel selection and message crafting.
With each advancement, however, comes new questions about how much control to cede to the machines. “While AI offers automation, marketers are cautious about giving it complete control; they need human input for brand consistency and strategy,” notes Briggs.
Moreover, she says, “existing approval processes struggle with AI’s speed, raising questions about oversight as companies strive to find balance between AI’s efficiency with human review.”
For CPGs in particular, no amount of AI sophistication can compensate for gaps in customer data, cautions Blank. “As vital as the technology is, you can get around a weak tech stack or an inefficient process, as long as the data is there. That’s the number one thing you must have to be super mature at personalization.”
As the Digital Landscape Evolves, So Must CPGs
The growth of digital marketing presents both an opportunity and a challenge for CPG brands — namely, in order to capitalize on that growth via personalization, brands must be able to adapt to the evolving landscape in all aspects of their approach.
Specifically with regard to martech, marketers are increasingly moving away from individual silo “point solutions” (e.g., product recommendation or website personalization tools) and seeking more integrated solutions that can execute campaigns seamlessly across multiple channels and platforms.
Even for CPG marketers who do not completely overhaul their tech stack, the need for interoperability across point solutions becomes more important, says Aashish Rangwalla, vice president of retail media at Goodway Group. A similar fragmentation challenge also exists in measurement.
“The best way around that is to use a mix of approaches,” says Rangwalla. “You've got to look at where multi-touch attribution makes sense versus mixed media modeling, and use various schools of reporting as a way to show incrementality.”
CPG companies have traditionally outsourced many of these capabilities, which puts the onus back on the company to find the right partners and hold them accountable for delivering results, says Tim Madigan, vice president of customer strategy for Glanbia Performance Nutrition (GPN) and a former e-commerce executive at Tyson Foods.
“The traditional partners that we’ve all grown up with are still trying to build this muscle,” Madigan says. “The good news is that many of these platforms now have user-friendly dashboards, so you actually have people in your building with hands on keys who can start making all of these media buys.”
For Clorox, knowing when and how to rely on outside partners is critical to staying ahead of the personalization curve. “While we maintain some in-house technology, the rapidly evolving tech landscape makes it essential to partner externally to stay at the forefront of innovation,” says Doyle Conlon.
Clorox also uses second- and third-party data to enhance personalized experiences. Doyle Conlon concludes, “It’s all about striking the right balance — using external data to make our marketing more relevant without crossing the line into feeling intrusive.”