Ad Viewability, Verification Drive Creative Reset For P&G: Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard

ORLANDO – After its push for digital media transparency began to gain traction, Procter & Gamble began to realize that it needed to alter its creative game. Things like ad duration and frequency took on new importance.

“It forced us to raise the bar even higher on ad creativity,” says P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard.

As a result, the company is moving deeper into one-to-one marketing and “the next generation of brand building,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.

With greater visibility into viewability and verification, P&G found that the average ad was being viewed in some social media feeds for less than two seconds. But the company was serving 30-second ads.

“So we said, ‘we need to make sure these ads work in two seconds.’”

P&G also was serving digital ads with too much frequency, “so we needed to be able to deal with that through things like programmatic.”

Now, innovation and consumer targeting have taken center stage for the packaged-goods giant. “We want to really find the next generation of ads and it’s moving us very quickly into mass one-to-one marketing,” says Pritchard.

As examples he cites work for Pampers, along with the futuristic Oral-B Genius electric toothbrush and the Olay Skin Advisor platform. These are not campaigns slated for mass, mixed audiences.

“Because we have consumer ID data, now we’re able to target specifically,” says Pritchard. “We’re going to give you something that’s useful to you when you need it and where you need it and not serve something to you when you don’t.”

Asked about targeting the right consumers across various digital platforms, Pritchard says “it remains to be seen” whether it can be accomplished. For now, platform-by-platform targeting capabilities are very effective.

“But at minimum, we’re able to do it within a platform like an Alibaba in China, which allows us to be able to use their consumer ID data and then be able to serve somebody an ad when they have a higher propensity to buy. The same thing is happening in Amazon.”

Pritchard and P&G have become standard bearers in the push for gender equality. Besides being the right thing to do, it’s good for everyone’s business objectives.

“With equality comes better society, but it also drives better growth because with economic equality it actually injects money and purchasing power into the market,” Pritchard says. “That’s good for everybody because when markets grow everybody grows.”

This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership series produced at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference, 2017. The series is presented by FreeWheel. Please find more videos from Orlando, visit this page.