Colgate-Palmolive pilots GenAI to create content faster, cut costs, and scale marketing across global brands.
Colgate-Palmolive has launched a GenAI content pilot to overcome rising demand for high-volume, multi-format marketing assets. The company faces a challenge shared by many CPG brands: produce relevant content for hundreds of markets with speed, quality, and consistency. Its goal was clear. Use GenAI to accelerate creation while maintaining brand standards and reducing production friction.
The pilot focused on the “3Vs” of content: volume, variety, and velocity. Colgate partnered with Hill’s Pet Nutrition, BCG, and Google to build a GenAI workflow for video production. The team used Google’s models to generate storyboards, create characters, and iterate scenes through rapid prompt cycles. This replaced slow cross-team reviews and costly manual adjustments. Marketers could test ideas instantly and push creative concepts farther without waiting for traditional production cycles.
The results exceeded expectations. The team produced consumer-ready ads four to six times faster than usual, at far lower cost per concept. GenAI also enabled “very natural and real” animal characters, which can be difficult with standard animation. The ads performed at or above business-as-usual benchmarks, showing that GenAI can deliver creative impact without quality loss. The model demonstrated a repeatable path to scale content creation while reducing bottlenecks. A BCG study supports this approach, noting that GenAI can eliminate 10–30% of marketing spend lost to content inefficiencies.
Colgate is now expanding its GenAI capabilities through enterprise upskilling. Employees across functions use Google Workspace and Gemini to learn text, image, and video generation under controlled guardrails. The company sees pilots as learning mechanisms that prepare teams for broader transformation. Colgate aims to build a future where GenAI supports its mission to deliver healthier lives for people and pets while strengthening global brand growth.
