Reckitt Unveils Results of GenAI Pilots at Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity

As the 71st Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity ends with GenAI dominating the agenda, Reckitt shared the results of innovative GenAI pilots that show how the technology is changing the face of marketing.

Reckitt’s IT and digital team, in partnership with Boston Consulting Group, undertook a series of pilots across Gaviscon, Finish and the company’s overall marketing function, over a four-month period. The pilots illustrated the advantages of GenAI in enhancing insights, creativity and productivity – generating better-quality outcomes – more consistently, in a significantly shorter length of time.

GenAI’s Transformational Power

GenAI can transform unstructured data into insightful new ideas and marketable concepts. Early findings showed that by using GenAI, teams can reduce concept development time by up to 60%, while significantly improving quality.

GenAI can also stimulate creativity and produce advertising content more efficiently. By using GenAI to adapt assets for full funnel use and localize them between countries, Reckitt found an approximate 30% reduction in the time needed to adapt and localize ads, with increased consistency in asset quality.

GenAI takes the drudgery out of repetitive tasks. Findings showed that time spent on everyday tasks such as a post-campaign media analysis, could be reduced by up to 90%, with the quality improving two-fold.

The pilots were conducted using a suite of tools that were tailored to Reckitt’s needs. These included custom-built GPTs trained on Reckitt data and expertise, multi-modal GenAI tools for content adaptation and localization and an interactive interface to create, test and refine new product concepts from consumer insights data.

Cutting Scope 3 Emissions

Reckitt is also using AI and GenAI to help cut its Scope 3 emissions by 50% by 2030 (versus 2015 base year) and achieve net zero by 2040. The company has already surpassed its initial targets for direct emissions and is now focusing on reducing Scope 3 emissions (which represent on average 96% of a company’s total emissions), with its network of suppliers.

Working with CO2 AI and Quantis, Reckitt collected over 300,000 data points to get more detailed insights into emissions per product, using AI and GenAI to transform these into a faster and more accurate carbon footprint, a process which previously involved manual categorization, which was both time-consuming and less precise.

In under four months, Reckitt said it obtained precise emissions data for each of its 25,000 products, improving the accuracy of its emissions footprint by 75 times — moving from 333 representative products to 25,000. This data revealed new ways to reduce emissions by 2030, which officials say will significantly contribute towards Reckitt’s net zero target.