How WPP Media Drove Up to 292% Efficiency Gains for Church & Dwight by Replacing Attribution with Incrementality
Challenge
Church & Dwight, the company behind Arm & Hammer, TheraBreath, Batiste, and dozens of other iconic household brands, needed to fundamentally rethink how it measured and acted on retail media performance.
The core problem was a limitation baked into traditional last-touch attribution: it cannot accurately distinguish the true causal impact of advertising from other factors, such as promotions, seasonality, or other media influences. The team needed to measure the real, extra sales an ad generated, not just sales that happened to occur after someone saw one. Without this, budget allocation decisions were being made on misleading signals, and the opportunity to optimize for true incremental return was being left on the table.
Solution
Church & Dwight, WPP Media, Incremental, and Skai formed a strategic three-way partnership to build the industry’s first fully connected measurement-to-activation retail media system.
- WPP Media provided strategic orchestration, portfolio-level planning, and governance over optimization frameworks.
- Incremental delivered advanced incrementality measurement.
- Skai enabled automated activation and bidding execution across retail media networks.
The defining innovation was a direct API integration between Incremental’s measurement environment and Skai’s activation platform, allowing daily campaign-level incrementality signals to flow automatically into the media buying workflow. Rather than waiting weeks for measurement analysis to inform planning, optimization recommendations were continuously incorporated into campaign management systems, enabling evidence-based decision-making every single day.
Through this integration, daily estimates on incremental sales and optimal budget recommendations were passed into Skai’s campaign management workflow. WPP Media configured optimization rules and portfolio guardrails that enabled campaigns to adjust budget allocations, bidding strategies, and placement priorities in response to changing incremental sales performance. This creates a virtuous cycle in which causal intelligence-informed execution, which in turn validates and refines the measurement model.
Additional bidding and placement rules were developed in Skai that leveraged incremental sales and incremental ROI in place of ad-attributed sales and ROAS, enabling incrementality insights to be activated at scale. The test was implemented across three brands: TheraBreath and Batiste on Target, and Arm & Hammer Laundry on Instacart.
Results
The measurement-to-activation system delivered substantial improvements in both media efficiency and topline revenue without increasing working media budgets.
- +161% increase in media efficiency for TheraBreath on Target
- +292% increase in media efficiency for Batiste on Target
- +27% topline revenue growth for Batiste during the optimization period
- +15% revenue growth for TheraBreath (reversing a prior decline)
- +21% improvement in media efficiency for Arm & Hammer Laundry on Instacart
- +20% revenue increase for Arm & Hammer for its highest-ever month on Instacart
By replacing attribution-based decision-making with an ensemble incrementality framework and leveraging workflow automation to turn those insights into automated activations, the partnership proved that incrementality-driven optimization can not only improve efficiency but also restore and accelerate brand growth trajectories.
Through the combined capabilities of WPP Media, Incremental, and Skai, Church & Dwight built the industry’s first fully connected measurement-to-activation retail media system that directly embedded incrementality measurement within day-to-day campaign optimization at scale. By replacing attribution-based decision-making with an ensemble incrementality framework and leveraging workflow automation to turn those insights directly into automated activations, the partnership delivered substantial improvements in media efficiency, revenue growth, and operational agility.
Jess Chen
Group Director, Commerce Activation
About WPP Media
WPP Media is WPP’s global media collective. In a world where media is everywhere and in everything, we bring the best platform, people, and partners together to create limitless opportunities for growth. For more information, visit wppmedia.com.
About Incremental
Incremental is the leader in causal intelligence for commerce and media, built for brands navigating fragmented measurement across RMNs that want to move beyond last touch attribution and ROAS. Drawing from proven methodology, we use an ensemble model to isolate what truly drives sales—across retailers, channels, and campaigns. Our platform replaces ROAS with transparent, decision-ready intelligence daily at a campaign level, integrated directly into your media buying platforms. Designed for the dynamic conditions of commerce, the Incremental platform reacts to ever-changing conditions online and offline, from inventory shortages to competitive pricing and digital shelf position. Leading manufacturers use Incremental to build smarter budgets and more accurate sales forecasts and deliver greater topline growth from their media dollars. For more information, visit incremental.com.
About Church & Dwight
Church & Dwight is a leading American manufacturer of household and personal care products. Best known for its iconic Arm & Hammer brand, the company boasts a diverse portfolio of consumer goods, including other well-known brands like OxiClean, Trojan condoms, Hero Cosmetics, Nair, Replens, Therabreath, and Batiste dry shampoo. Their focus is on developing, manufacturing, and marketing value-added products that are staples in homes worldwide.
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