It’s not often you hear a CPG giant talking about Cannes Lions and clean rooms in the same breath. But for Kimberly-Clark, creativity and commerce are now inseparable.
Speaking at the IAB’s Connected Commerce Summit in New York, Adrianne del Sol, vice-president of digital commerce at Kimberly-Clark, told The Drum that the company has undergone a “real step change” in how it approaches marketing.
“We’re one of the first, if not the first, CPGs to hire a chief creative officer,” Del Sol explained. “It’s a major shift for us, and we’re already starting to see the impact of having those individuals in place.”
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A creative heavyweight inside CPG
That hire is Luiz Sanches, global chief creative & design officer at Kimberly-Clark. His arrival in January was a statement of intent.
Sanches is one of the world’s most awarded creatives, with more than three decades at AlmapBBDO under his belt. He helped transform the São Paulo shop into a global powerhouse, winning Agency of the Year at Cannes four times and racking up more than 250 Lions. “We were agency of the year, agency of the decade. I’ve already done everything you can do on that side of the business,” he told The Drum.
Now he’s inside Kimberly-Clark, making it the only major CPG to put a creative director of his stature at the very top table.
From Cannes to conversion
Del Sol points to ‘The Kleenex Score’ campaign, which won at Cannes, as proof of how creativity now flows through every layer of the company.
“We built a teardrop score chart for movies – a scale of one to five teardrops. A five meant you were going to cry so much in this movie that you’d need a lot of Kleenex,” she said. “We put the campaign on IMDb so that when people looked up a film, they saw the Kleenex score and then we could drive them to Amazon to make a purchase. I’m so proud of it, because it was one of the first times I’ve seen master-level creative work connect all the way through to the point of conversion.”
For Del Sol, that kind of throughline is non-negotiable. “Consumers are connecting with us across platforms. We need a single thread, whether it’s a big brand campaign or something right at the point of conversion.”
Creativity in the blush aisle
Some of Kimberly-Clark’s most daring work is happening in “blush” categories such as adult incontinence – products that many retailers restrict in their media networks. Here, creativity is as much about sensitivity as it is about spectacle.
“We’ve had to be very creative because we want to respect people,” Del Sol said. “Putting a pad in your undergarments as a man is not something you grow up with. Women are used to it through menstruation, but for men, it’s a big behavioral shift. So we need to normalize it in a way that feels candid, authentic and respectful.”
Recent examples include a Katherine Heigl-hosted Amazon Live conversation about perimenopause for Poise and a Depend campaign fronted by NFL legend Deion Sanders to destigmatize male incontinence. Both paired authentic storytelling with commerce activations.
Data-driven imagination
Behind these creative bets is a mountain of data. Del Sol explained how partnerships with retail networks allow Kimberly-Clark to reach consumers more effectively – even in categories that can’t be marketed directly.
She pointed to Costco’s data clean rooms, powered by The Trade Desk, as one example: “Costco has always been very protective of member data, but recently it has started to open up new opportunities. We leveraged Costco’s first-party data to reach several million incremental members and that helped us drive acquisition. I’m proud of that partnership because it came from an unexpected place – beyond the usual suspects like Amazon, Walmart or Target.”
It’s part of a broader strategy of ruthless prioritization. “There are hundreds of networks out there – over 235. It’s not easy. So we prioritize ruthlessly: for this brand, during this launch, which networks are most critical to achieve our business objectives?”
The next frontier: generative search
Like many at the IAB summit, Del Sol sees generative AI as the next big disruption. “Generative engine optimization is the next frontier in retail media,” she said. “I don’t have all the answers – it’s early days – but imagine someone going to a chatbot and asking: ‘Why is this happening to me?’ We want Kimberly-Clark brands to be the ones offering the answer, providing reassurance and then driving to the right solution.”
She added: “Without creativity, connected commerce risks becoming a commodity race. With it, you win both hearts and baskets.”
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