According to a report in US trade journal AdAge, the FMCG company is ramping up its online budget from the less than $1m it spent on online measured media in 2008.
It has traditionally spent more than 90% of its $475m annual media budget on TV, but is about to reduce that after working for almost a year on ways to augment its reach through TV by using online video.
From April 1 it will advertise brands such as AirWick and Clearasil through more than a dozen video ad networks including , , and , rather than broadcaster-owned sites such as and .
Marc Fonzetti, media manager at Reckitt Benckiser, said: "We've seen a fundamental shift in consumer consumption and media habits migrating over to digital video. Obviously YouTube started it, but we want to be aligned with professional content.
"With broadband getting to the scale that it has, the shift has happened. The integration of traditional and digital media is here now."
The strategy emphasises making CPM buying more efficient and integrating TV and online measurement.
Adam Kasper, senior vice-president of digital media at Reckitt Benckiser's digital agency Media Contacts, said: "The CPM was the driving factor here. We needed to make it compelling from a buying standpoint in terms of how these [online] CPM's related to TV CPMs, and we had to deliver the impressions more efficiently than TV did."
The change appears to apply only to the company's US media activity. Reckitt Benckiser's UK operation was unavailable for comment at the time of publication.
Reckitt Benckiser's global media spend increased by 26% to more than £800m in 2008.
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