NAPLES, FL: Colgate, the oral care brand, is leveraging a nuanced approach to targeting as it seeks to move beyond an audience that potentially includes all "people with teeth".

Mindel Klein Lepore, Worldwide Director/Global Digital Marketing at Colgate-Palmolive, discussed this topic at the Association of National Advertisers' (ANA) 2016 Masters of Measurement Conference.

And she reported that while Colgate's prospective customer base, in its broadest terms, can indeed be described as "people with teeth", new digital technologies are enabling the brand to break this group down into more defined pockets.

"Consumers are more targetable than ever," said Lepore. (For further details of the brand's approach, read Warc's exclusive report: How Colgate-Palmolive rebuilt audience-engagement function.)

"With technology and data-driven marketing, we have the opportunity to reach the right people with more relevant messaging and impactful advertising in the right places at the right time."

In pursuing this goal, the brand has developed a "holistic" perspective of the consumer journey premised on "their needs and wants, anticipating [their desires] based on actual online behaviour and [discovering] their motivations."

Specifically, its marketing model rests on increasingly fluid, reflexive underpinnings that activate deeper insights with greater rapidity. "It's about being faster in how we connect with our consumers," Lepore said.

"It's being smarter about it, looking at our consumers as people versus targets, being more strategic in the way we think about our communications, and being increasingly real time."

Among the tools and tactics helping turn this theory into practice are a data management platform (DMP), advanced audience targeting and a set of consumer-engagement centres in various locations.

Using a data management platform, for instance, has assisted Colgate achieve what Lepore called the "audience discovery" process, and splitting it into categories such as "intenders" and "info-seekers".

"Essentially, what the DMP does for Colgate is really simple: It manages our structured data holistically, so we can have an all-encompassing view of a person," she said.

Data sourced from Warc