Every dairy, brewery and beverage plant runs clean-in-place (CIP) washes. They’re essential for food safety and product quality, and they take up a lot of production time.

Ecolab invented CIP. In September 2025, at Drinktec, it launched Ecolab CIP IQ: an AI-enhanced digital tool that monitors every wash in real time. It flags runs that don’t follow a plant’s cleaning procedures and finds ways to run them more efficiently.

Ecolab says customers can see up to 15% more capacity and 20% less water use. (Those figures are averages from customer sites, and results vary.) Ecolab asked us to help launch it in a way that made a technical product feel like a competitive edge.
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Plant managers are practical. They’re skeptical of AI hype, and with good reason: an MIT study found that 95% of enterprises investing heavily in AI see zero return.

What they do have is real questions. I scheduled a wash, but did it run? It ran, but was it effective? Is my optimization even working?

The launch had to answer those questions plainly for customers. It also had to give Ecolab’s own sales teams something they’d be excited to carry into every plant.

CIP people talk about wash “runs.” Working with Ecolab’s team, we took that everyday word and turned it into a race. Running CIP is the baseline. Outrunning it means cleaner washes, less downtime and more capacity than the plant down the road.

The platform gave the launch an athletic energy that technical tools rarely get: sprinters on the starting line, water that moves like a finish-line sprint, and a sneaker-and-star badge that worked as well on a sticker as on an ad.

Under the energy, the message stayed concrete. Verification, conformance and optimization: confirm every wash ran, catch the ones that didn’t follow procedure, and find the next improvement.

The Performance Max campaign got about six times the industry benchmark click-through rate. Performance Max ads usually get lower click-through rates than search ads. The top performers came straight from the platform: “Do your CIP washes outrun?” and the “Unlock your full CIP capacity” image.

And the partnership kept growing. In 2026, Ecolab brought us back to help with a holistic CIP initiative and CIP equipment content.