Interview: How Kimberly-Clark streamlines production to save on time & cost by accessing a range of creative talent.

To fuel growing media technologies, marketers need to produce more content, for more channels, by harnessing a range of specialist creative capabilities. We spoke to Pip Gagg, Head of Marketing for Baby & Child Care, to hear how Kimberly-Clark are solving this challenge by tapping into Genero’s creative ecosystem.

With beloved brands such as Kleenex and Huggies, Kimberly-Clark is a trusted part of the lives of almost a quarter of the world’s population. And as a growing global FMCG business, they’re facing a number of key challenges.

“We’re in a market where there’s never been so much pressure on pricing” says Pip. “This pressure is coming from both our customers, but also impacts our budgets”. The way the Kimberly-Clark overcomes this from a consumer perspective, Pip explains, is to premiumise and focus on quality – both through the product itself, and also the positioning of their brands.

With products targeting a range of demographics from teenagers, to parents, to the aged community, Kimberly-Clark is tasked with producing a wide variety of content to meet their audiences on their preferred channels and platforms. “How our audiences engage with us is constantly evolving, and they’re quite demanding in where and how they want to receive content from us” says Pip. “Not only do we need a wide array of content, but we also need to be mindful of the different platforms and where we engage with the range of consumers that we deal with at Kimberly-Clark”.

Ultimately this will be a challenge that’s echoed by enterprise brands around the world: brands need high volumes of best-practice content to remain top of mind, but their products and services must also be high quality.

Filling the gap between in-house and agency resources.

As a multinational company, Kimberly-Clark has quite a traditional marketing services structure which will be familiar to a lot of brands.

• A strong global marketing team who provide a lot of campaign and platform support, sharing ideas that can be adopted and adapted locally.
• Local marketing teams who develop unique local campaigns and roll out global campaigns in their region.
• Key creative agencies who deliver major strategic thinking and hero campaigns.
• Some in-house resource that provides design, copywriting and basic production

The final piece of the marketing puzzle is Genero’s creative ecosystem, which enables efficient production of best practice assets for all platforms and channels. “We had more demand for content than we were able to supply resource-wise using our external agencies and in-house teams, but also from a budget perspective” explains Pip. “That’s when we really leaned on Genero to understand how they can fill that gap, and to make sure we’re staying ahead and meeting the different needs of our consumers.”

What is a creative and production ecosystem?

In Genero’s case, this encompasses the three pillars below:

• Global Creative Network: 130k production companies, directors, editors, animators, photographers, designers and other creatives, in every corner of the globe.
• Production Platform: Purpose-built, end-to-end platform, delivers efficient workflow to source and collaborate with creatives, from briefing to content delivery.
• Expert Team: Our highly experienced client service teams provide the level of support you need, located in each major advertising region to provide local and global support.

The partnership.

Since 2019, Kimberly-Clark and Genero have collaborated on 65+ briefs, across seven brands, in three regions and are currently expanding into new regions. Pip explains that the benefits they see fall into three main categories:

• The ability to efficiently scale production of digital content: “While the need for content has been increasing, budgets have been shrinking” says Pip. “So what we’re able to do with Genero is create a number of different bespoke creatives for all our required platforms, and address the different format needs of our media plans”
• The guidance and expertise provided by the Genero team: “We’re limited with our internal resources, so having someone to help us manage the production process is invaluable. We’re not production houses, we don’t know all those details. So leaning on the specialist knowledge that Genero provides is incredibly helpful”.
• Access to a huge global network of professional creatives: “The way we win with our consumers is making sure we have creative that cuts through and that consumers will engage with, and to me, that’s also the massive value in our partnership. Having a network of diverse different thinking, we’ve been able to bring new ways of looking at things that we’ve had challenges with in the past. There’s power in numbers.”

See the partnership in action.

Click here to watch the full webinar and see a number of case studies which show the partnership in action. These include:

• A campaign that took only four weeks from brief to completion, which has been so successful it’s still being used three years later.
• A hyper-contextual YouTube campaign for Kleenex that achieved a 90% completion rate.
• Product demo videos which doubled Kimberly-Clark’s usual product recall.