Here’s what Pritchard wants to reinvent in the industry:
That’s no overnight reinvention, but Pritchard has made clear he’s not afraid of lofty goals.
At the the core of the reinvention in media and advertising is data. “Walled gardens are going to remain walled,” says Pritchard, so P&G worked to build its own customer database that now includes more than 1 billion customer IDs. From there, it can craft “smart” audiences, which Pritchard says goes beyond broad age groups to group customers around indicators like common behavior and demographics.
“Smart audiences allow you to use behavior and demographic data to precisely reach people, wiping out waste and increasing the ability to grow sales,” he says.
In China, this is playing out on a mass scale. In P&G’s “most advanced market,” 80 percent of the buying happens programmatically or automatically, which has reduced waste by 30 percent and increased reach by 50 percent two years in a row.
At the end of the day, Pritchard believes industry growth boils down to control. “Taking control of your own marketing and activities is growth.”
This video is part of Beet.TV’s coverage of the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference in Orlando, 2019. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>That’s not all. By Cannes 2020, the ANA, which Pritchard is a part of, wants to accomplish a 100 percent accurate portrayal of all humans in advertising and to eliminate bias in advertising by Cannes 2022.
These are ambitious goals, but in this interview with Beet.TV at the CMO Growth Council conference where he was a featured speaker, Pritchard says he’s already seeing progress.
In figuring out better brand safety measurements through the Global Alliance for Responsible Media, Pritchard says work is being done to evaluate how toxic content – which he describes as “hateful” and “dangerous” – gets out there, how brands end up appearing and advertising against it, how advertising ends up funding “bad actors,” and how fraud figures in.
“Many of the platforms that were built were not necessarily built for advertising,” says Pritchard. “They were built for all sorts of content being loaded on there and there are some continuing issues around brand safety.”
Pritchard says steps are being put together in order to identify toxic content that will serve as part of the Alliance’s charter.
Nefarious content is just one battle Pritchard is participating in. Through ANA co-initiatives #SeeHer, #SeeAll and Free The Work, programs for which Pritchard serves as marketing co-chair, the industry is developing resources and services available to participating CMOs that cover pressing issues in advertising, including inclusion, diversity, equality and sustainability.
By helping to lead the way with P&G, the world’s biggest advertiser that controls a global budget of $7.1 billion, Pritchard sees progress is possible.
“It’s advanced a lot because people now have access to best practices [and] resources,” says Pritchard. “Shining the light on the importance of this has elevated our game when it comes to eliminating bias in our advertising.”
This video is was produce in Orlando at the CMO Growth Council. The series is sponsored by iSpot.tv. For more videos from the event, please visit this page.
]]>“We’ve been focusing on reinventing brand building for the past couple of years, a lot on media, a lot with agencies, a lot with innovation and now advertising,” P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard says in this interview at Cannes with Beet.TV.
“What we’re trying to do is merge the ad world with other creative worlds of film making, music, comedy, technology, journalism and the encouragement that I would provide is for others to join forces with these worlds.”
P&G LifeLab showcases the integration of technology into brands to create better consumer experiences. “It includes a partnership with Thrive and Arianna Huffington where we’ve embedded her micro steps for positive mental well being and emotional well being into our everyday products like Oral B,” says Pritchard.
Also within P&G LifeLab is the company’s SK-II FutureX Smart Store “so you can get the entire retail experience, which kind of replaces advertising to a large extent,” Pritchard adds.
A creative partnership with John Legend integrates multiple genres to explore various aspects of humanity and the human experience—including parenthood, modern masculinity, music and social justice—with P&G and its Pampers, Gillette and SK-II brands.
“We have a partnership with Saturday Morning premiering THE LOOK, a film that will help change your perspective on racial bias and it includes VR experiences from Verizon Media RYOT so you can immerse and have empathy at the same time.”
THE LOOK follows The Talk, which two years ago addressed racial bias and the Black Lives matter social movement, as Campaign reports.
“Finally, to make sure that we can get diversity and inclusion behind the camera, we’re working with Alma Har’el on re-launching Free the Bid into Free The Work, which will get women and underrepresented creators behind the camera,” Pritchard says.
“We love our existing agencies, and add on top of that creative partnerships with these different geniuses to be able to create a new abundance of creativity.”
You are watching Beet.TV coverage of the CMO Growth Council Summit in Cannes. This series is presented by Teads. For more videos form our series, visit this page. Please find all our coverage from Cannes 2019, right here.
]]>“Marketers need to be part of the news environment because our consumers are engaged in the news environment,” P&G’s Chief Brand Officer says in this interview with Beet.TV. “They’re getting information about the world and about society and about trends, and therefore that’s an opportunity for them to get information about our products and our brands.”
Engaging with consumers beyond headlines and quick news stories can convey messaging that brief ads alongside such content cannot, according to Pritchard.
“We can create content that a journalist or a news company can do a better job of communicating. They can unpack it in maybe a more in depth way and create different views of that particular area that might be of interest to people.”
Last year, P&G partnered with Great Big Story on a 20-minute film titled Words Matter chronicling the venerable marketer’s journey to endorsing its acceptance of all things LGBTQ—a journey that took about 30 years. The film gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the internal process that ultimately produced its LGBTQ stance.
“That was a great story and it got a lot of interest from a lot of people,” Pritchard says. “It shined the light on our company in a way that we probably couldn’t have done ourselves. It was better and more credible for a news organization doing so.”
Those same capabilities are one reason why P&G has a partnership with Katie Couric Media. “She’s a great journalist. She’s told some of the best stories and done some of the best investigative journalism of anyone.”
Asked about the company’s brand safety guidelines for news content, Pritchard says the standards are the same across every piece of content or program in which P&G advertises “because you’re judged by the company you keep. If a line is crossed then we’ll pull our ads.”
He’d like to see a higher bar for expectations of news content in the areas of truth and transparency. Light needs to be shone on situations “in such a way that has multiple views as opposed to one skewed view.” In addition, Pritchard would prefer to see less focus on “those things that are sensational and focus on a range of things. Because the news has a huge impact on culture, on images, on portrayals of people and it’s really important that they get the right balance of both the positive and negative in their programming.”
This video is part of a Beet.TV series exploring the dynamic news landscape and opportunities for marketers. The series is sponsored by CNN. For more from the series, please visit this page.
]]>“We Believe defies the convention that ‘boys will be boys,’ which is just an excuse for bad behavior,” P&G Chief Brand Officer said in an email to Beet.TV. “Although many examples exist where men are NOT at their best, we believe in the best in men and that by holding each other accountable, eliminating excuses for bad behavior and being a role model for a new generation we can deliver positive and lasting change.”
In this interview at CES 2019, Pritchard explains P&G’s work with the Association of National Advertisers’ CMO Growth Council in the area of society and sustainability. Among other goals, the company is focusing on racial equality “both in the advertising and content that we create, but also behind the camera so we can really create much greater degree of equality, diversity and inclusion throughout our entire creative supply chain.”
At the 2018 Cannes Lions, racial equality was the subject of an initiative by I.D.E.A. hosted by Spotify and P&G and sponsored by true[X]. This Beet.TV series from the event features a range of industry executives discussing how their companies are promoting racial diversity.
The purpose of We Believe is to inspire men to be part of the solution by moving from “inaction to being a role model for positive action for themselves, their loved ones, their peers, and for the next generation of men.” To support that effort, Gillette has launched thebestmencanbe.org, which includes a commitment to donate at least $1 million each year, for the next three years, to organizations with programs that help men of all ages achieve their personal “best,” starting with the Boys & Girls Club of America.
“I’m quite proud of this campaign and of the Gillette team, their partners at Grey, and film director Kim Gehrig (who we discovered through Free The Bid) for redefining what it means to be “The Best a Man Can Get,” Pritchard said in his email.
Pritchard’s desire is that all companies get involved in such movements as the ANA’s #SeeHer and its Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing.
“Because if everybody in the industry is involved it will truly change the way all people view the world.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“What we want to do is use technology to be able to make everyday life just a little bit better with our everyday household and personal care products,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet.TV at the annual CES event.
“We studied Silicon Valley because what we knew we needed to do is we needed to move faster. We knew technology was disrupting everything,” he says. “That has spawned this portfolio of seed-stage experiments that are now starting to get into the marketplace.”
Among the innovations P&G has on display in Las Vegas is a Gillette razor blade that heats up in about a second, a smart Oral B toothbrush that visually guides one through optimal teeth cleaning and the Opté Precision Skincare system, as Advertising Age reports. Opté uses a digital camera to help determine the right amount of makeup to apply, which is about 5% “of the normal foundation,” Pritchard notes. “So your skin looks natural without all that makeup.”
P&G has access to some 275,000 startups, according to Pritchard, although it doesn’t work with all of them. The 130 startups are under the aegis of P&G Ventures.
At the retail level, P&G is showcasing the future of beauty retailing in the form of the SK-II Future X Smart Store, which launched in Tokyo in May 2018 and then in Shanghai and Singapore. It’s built around the concept of merging the physical and digital retail environment, beginning with a face scan in a booth that produces five key metrics for specific skin-care treatment, as CNET writes.
The overarching goal is to provide “irresistible superiority” over competitors.
With Olay Skin Advisors, users take a selfie and then technology “diagnoses your skin’s age versus your actual age, which is a frightening experience by the way,” says Pritchard.
He hopes P&G is setting examples for other marketers looking to operate as though they were startups as opposed to big, established legacy companies. At CES, he participated in a panel discussion with P&G Chief Research, Development and Innovation Officer Katy Fish, with whom Pritchard is “joined at the hip. It’s not a silo anymore between R&D and marketing. It is an integrated teamwork to create the experiences, and that’s what I suggest other people do.”
This video is part of Beet.TV coverage of CES 2019. The series is sponsored by NBCUniversal. For more coverage, please visit this page.
]]>“The CMO Growth Council was formed to focus on marketing taking back control and leading disruption because marketing is being disrupted completely but taking control to lead disruption to drive growth,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet.TV at this week’s Masters of Marketing conference. “Because there’s not enough growth.”
Earlier this year, the ANA Masters Circle got together with 25 CMOs in Cannes and focused on five areas that are perceived to have the greatest opportunity to drive more growth. They are data and technology, customer centricity, brand experience and innovation, talent and capability, and society and sustainability.
“We spent the last couple of days with 200 CMO’s going through what the 25 CMO’s had come up with over the past few months and identified several areas that looked of great interest to us to really advance growth,” says Pritchard. “Data and technology is clearly one of the big ones, because mass marketing is being disrupted and everyone is reinventing media and reinventing advertising for that matter.”
As a result, CMO’s need to know about data management platforms, analytics capabilities, algorithms and related areas.
“What the CMO’s decided is that this is something we really have to just transform from an industry standpoint,” Pritchard explains. “And what we talked about was committing to creating what’s essentially an ANA marketing university that would bring all the best minds together through the ANA to be able to create the capability industrywide to transform our industry.”
He says that ANA CEO Bob Liodice made a big commitment “on the spot to make that happen.” Moreover, Pritchard asked whether CMO’s would be willing to serve as adjunct professors “and a bunch of hands went up.”
Another subject of great interest to the CMOs concerns customer centricity and brand experience and innovation so that brands can create relevant experiences across all consumer touchpoints. “Every single one of us was talking about how we’re using lean startup and lean innovation capabilities to be able to do fast cycle iterations in very small groups to be able to create ideas and get them out in the market much more quickly,” Pritchard says.
He is especially passionate about society and sustainability to be a force for good and a force for growth. “We invited everyone join #SeeHer, join the Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing, join Free The Bid so you can get equality behind the camera. And then we also introduced an idea of joining #Brands For Good,” one of whose efforts is to recognize brands that try to reduce plastic consumption.
This series “Growing Brands and Driving Results,” was produced at the ANA Masters in Marketing ’18 conference in Orlando. The series is sponsored by the FreeWheel Council for Premium Video. Please find additional coverage here.
]]>“There’s a lot of negative narrative out there about what’s going wrong for agencies,” says Marla Kaplowitz, President and CEO of the 4A’s, long known as the American Association of Advertising Agencies.
But, Kaplowitz adds in this interview with Beet.TV at the organization’s annual Accelerate conference, “What about the client of the future? What does that look like?”
She cites comments made at the conference by Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun, who shared a stage with Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard and Grey New York CEO Debby Reiner to discuss client-agency relations.
“One of the things I was happy to hear Arthur Sadoun talk about today is there’s so much focus on the agency of the future, which we think of more as the agency of today and tomorrow because agencies are constantly evolving and have that entrepreneurial spirit,” Kaplowitz says.
As Campaign reports, Sadoun questioned the role marketers need to play when he noted, “Every client is talking about growth, but there’s no growth unless you have strong partners.”
Says Kaplowitz, “What is the responsibility of marketers to really understand the intersection of data and creativity and technology and connecting with consumers and how you deliver that in those brand experiences?”
On the personnel front, the 4A’s has for nearly 50 years offered a multicultural intern program for its agency members. “But what’s clear is that we haven’t focused enough on the inclusion side. And that’s where you’re going to start to see some change. It’s really about action and no more talk. There’s enough talk at this point.”
To this end, the 4A’s recently launched the Enlightened Workplace Certification Program aimed at creating safe and productive work environments that create cultures of inclusion, equity, creative dialogue and social transformation. “The intent is to support agencies in eliminating discrimination, harassment, bullying, intimidation and retaliation,” according to a release announcing the program.
The 4A’s is working with the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), a nonprofit that facilitates the development of standards by accrediting the procedures of standards-developing organizations.
In addition, the 4A’s is a supporter of the TIME’S UP movement, “which we believe is a fantastic way to really have the dialogue but also really push forward in a very positive way and in a very inclusive way,” says Kaplowitz.
This video is part of a series titled The Road to the Digital Content NewFronts. It is a preview of topics to be explored at IAB’s NewFronts, which begin on April 30. This series is presented by Meredith Corporation. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
]]>Other industry semantics need to be updated as well, IAB President & CEO Randall Rothenberg says in this interview with Beet.TV. The Annual Leadership Meeting takes place Feb. 11-13 at the JW Marriott Desert Springs Resort & Spa, Palm Desert, CA.
“The time has come to get rid of this notion of sell-side and buy-side. It is deficient and it actually harms everybody because it makes it seem as if brands and their partner organizations are in kind of commander service relationships,” says Rothenberg.
IAB research shows that in the Direct Brand Economy, buyers and sellers come together in “vital integrated supply chain relationships that the brands cannot live without and nor obviously can publishers and others live without.” Thus buy-side, sell-side linguistics constitutes “awful language and ought to be banished for all time.”
The same research casts new light on the notion of “brand safety” in digital advertising environments, according to Rothenberg. Among other things, the research proves it has nothing to do with that “soft thing” called brand reputation but everything to do with unfettered access to first-party data.
Data fuels every function of the brand enterprise, from new-product development to figuring out what to charge individual customers. It’s all done increasingly in real time with decisions made on feedback loops.
“Companies need continuous access to first-party data, which means that it requires the complete trust of its consumer base. No trust equals no data equals no company,” Rothenberg says.
Therefore, brand safety isn’t optional. “It is essential to the future of a brand.”
The IAB has been a major proponent of the need for greater transparency on digital advertising platforms. Rothenberg says 2017 was probably the best year ever in terms of the progress that has been achieved. He points to comments by Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble, in an interview with Digiday in which Pritchard says the drive for a more transparent digital ecosystem is “80 percent complete.”
This video is part of a series covering the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. The series is sponsored by AppNexus. Please visit this page for more coverage.
]]>“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.
]]>That $100 million “was just part of that effort where what we found is there was not enough assurance that our ads weren’t going to show up in the wrong place. We did not want our ads showing up in anything associated with violence, bigotry or hate,” Pritchard says in this interview with Beet. TV at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).
“Since we couldn’t be assured of that, we pulled the money.”
Two reasons why P&G has been so adamant about cleaning up digital media stems from its inherent waste and fraud, according to Pritchard.
“Part of that is the maturity of the ecosystem. Now that it’s 200 billion dollars it was time to make sure that it’s cleaned up,” he says.
P&G teamed up with, among others, the ANA and the Media Ratings Council to focus on digital ad viewability, verification of ad delivery, anti-fraud and brand safety.
The company cut some of its estimated $2.4 billion in annual ad spending to reduce digital ad waste and “invest in doing what really matters, which is better advertising and better innovation,” Pritchard says. “It was kind of a pretty big move, but it paid out because we still grew, we still delivered our objectives.”
In addition to digital media, P&G also cited cuts to agency and production spending that lead to a quarter-over-quarter profit margin boost of nearly one percent in the fourth quarter, as ADWEEK reports.
P&G has four main expectations for its partners in digital advertising, according to Pritchard: delivering data show ad viewability, third-party verification of audience reach, assurance that P&G ads aren’t being served to bots and, finally, “make sure they can assure us that our ads are going to show up where we want to place them, not in terrorist videos.”
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.
]]>“It’s not about writing a check and being part of something,” says Chris Weil, Chairman and CEO of brand marketing agency Momentum Worldwide. “You’re borrowing the equity of a team, a celebrity, a league and you’re borrowing their audience and you’re trying to connect with them.”
In the sports sponsorship world, whether it’s American Express, United Airlines, Coca-Cola, SAP or Verizon, “A sponsorship is a borrowed equity programming,” Weil says in this interview with Beet.TV at the 2017 Transformation conference of the 4A’s.
So if one looks at what brands are trying to do with content, the learnings from many years of sponsorship marketing come to the fore. It’s about how to create content “that is not just push messaging but is about how you add utility and value to the consumer’s life and to their experience,” Weil says.
In other words, successfully sponsoring content always begins with the audience and the value exchange, but the most important part is the desired connection. “Everybody talks about targeting, targeting, targeting and how we’re going to deliver the specific message at the specific moment,” says Weill. “The reality is that more than targeting it’s the creative. How are you actually going to deliver a message that somebody cares about at a given time.”
Asked about measuring ROI on sponsored content, Weil eschews things like viewability and click-through rates. “Those are just distractions to what the real game is, which is to drive growth for our clients,” Weil adds, citing Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard’s comments at Transformation about the importance of P&G’s agency partners.
When it comes to leveraging influencer audiences online, Weil says that in order to guarantee earned reach there has to be a buy involved. “Things don’t go viral just simply to go viral. You have to look at how you use influencer audiences to help expand and amplify your message. And that is a value exchange that typically is money,” Weil says.
This video is part of series produced in Los Angeles at the 4A’s Transformation ’17. The series is sponsored by Extreme Reach. For more videos from the conference, please visit this page.
]]>If the advertising industry maps measurement as a key performance indicator, it we can start addressing some of the issues of confidence “and figure out how to advertise better,” Feigenson says in this interview at the recent Beet.TV Leadership Summit titled Outcomes and presented by Eyeview.
He cites recent remarks by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard calling for a cleanup of the digital advertising ecosystem as “a pretty bold statement for the industry.” As Advertising Age reports, Pritchard told a gathering of the Internet Advertising Bureau that “the days of giving digital a pass are over.”
Historically speaking, television advertising has been effective and predictable, according to Feigenson. Using media mix models, advertisers have had a pretty solid understanding of what their outcomes would look like.
But as audiences continue to migrate to the digital world and advertisers aggregate them through targeting, “what you find are there are gaps in some cases,” says Feigenson.
In addition to digital fraud and viewability issues, there can be a lack of understanding or “forgetfulness” of the basics of good advertising,” according to Feigenson.
Brands have always spent lots of time testing television creative in advance of launching campaigns. “We find over and over again creative is the most important variable in effectiveness,” he says.
However, “The way of doing that in the digital world is to test more of a feedback loop against effectiveness. I think that’s where there are some interesting opportunities,” says Feigenson. He does believe that progress is being made in the way publishers are proving their contributions to sales lift.
This video is part of a Beet.TV leadership summit on video outcomes presented by Eyeview. For more videos from event, please visit this page.
]]>“We finally seem to be going a little bit beyond just the discussion of viewability and fraud and getting back to how does that combine with audience,” Fetters says in an interview with Beet.TV at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. “I’m hearing the buy side really begin start to ask again am I getting the audience I thought I was buying.”
Now SVP, National Agencies & CPG Business at comScore, less than two years ago Fetters was on the buy side, as Director of Global Insights at the Kellogg Company. He thinks it’s a positive sign that the industry seems to be moving beyond a sole concentration on viewability, fraud and eliminating waste.
“It think we’ve probably made a lot of progress in beginning to eliminate a lot of the waste in the ecosystem, but now I’m seeing the attention turn back to it’s not enough to just know that I’m getting a quality impression,” Fetters says. “I want to know who’s seeing that impression.”
Addressing the digital ad ecosystem, Fetters expects the consolidation among ad tech providers to continue. “Clearly we’re seeing it week after week, month after month,” he says.
It cannot happen fast enough, according to Fetters. “I think if you look at some of the campaigns that are running today, where you may have three, four, five, six tags on an ad to do various measures or activities against that ad or to collect data. Marketers are realizing this is too much and this is a mess,” he says.
Alluding to remarks at the IAB event by Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard, Fetters acknowledges that marketers have mostly allowed the digital ad ecosystem to be managed for them. But that’s changing.
“Now they’re kind of stepping up and saying how much of my working dollar is going against non-working activity and can I be more efficient with that,” says Fetters. I think we’re going to see a big move toward simplifying the execution of ad serving, how do we get ads in front of consumers.”
It’s a question of necessity, according to Fetters, “because the buyers are starting to take notice, the buyers are starting to demand it.”
He says it’s fascinating to see the expanding desire by brands to build more targeted TV plans to reach specific audiences. And while addressable or programmatic TV “may be not quite scalable today, it certainly is not stopping the same idea of using data to build television-based audience in a new way.”
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>“It’s just a means of servicing our clients,” Guenther says of programmatic in an interview with Beet.TV during a break at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting.
Private or preferred programmatic advertising buys “are growing rapidly” at News Corp., in addition to open auction buys, according to Guenther. “It varies dramatically” depending on marketers’ needs.
He believes that what’s most important for publishers from an infrastructure standpoint is to be flexible. “Nothing’s set in stone. It’s an evolving space.”
On the topic of server-to-server header bidding, for example, a subject of much conversation at the IAB confab, Guenther notes that the technique “has actually been around for a number of years. We’re going to see how that evolves and I’m sure that will become part of our programmatic mix in the future, too.”
For now, Guenther says News Corp. has been rolling out Prebid.js from AppNexus “and we’ve been very happy” with it.
“The critical thing you need to do as a publisher is to be on top of what’s the most efficient way of delivering advertising and keep modifying your infrastructure as appropriate,” Guenther says.
Another focus of the IAB sessions is combatting digital ad fraud and coming up with ways to tamp down on so-called fake news. “The conversation around fake news aligns with a lot of things we’ve been talking about at News Corp.,” Guenther says. “That’s obviously a very important topic that’s near and dear to us.”
He’s pleased that discussion of fake news has “infused” the gathering. “It feels like every session I’ve been to has brought that up. The need to combat it. How we all play a part in addressing it,” he says.
Asked about online advertising viewability standards, Guenther alludes to remarks by Procter & Gamble Chief Marketing Officer Marc Pritchard, who who at the outset of the IAB event bemoaned “crappy advertising accompanied by even crappier viewing experiences,” as CNBC reports. “This desire within the industry to work toward these goals I think will make things easier and more efficient and help our advertisers and help our users. I think it’s a good trend this year,” Guenther says.
This video is part of a series produced at the IAB Annual Leadership Meeting. Beet.TV’s coverage of this event is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more videos from this series, please visit this page.
]]>Pritchard showcased the Always campaign along with other P&G efforts for brands like Ariel and Pepto-Bismol during a presentation titled Raising the Bar on Creativity at the Masters of Marketing Conference of the Association of National Advertisers.
In a subsequent interview with Beet.TV, having arduously defended advertising in his presentation amid so much industry talk about “content,” Pritchard observes that, “There are so many ways we can reach people and there are so many messages that our brands can actually provide while still looking like your brand.”
What’s most important is that “It has to be a great idea,” Pritchard says. “An idea that’s not that meaningful, you can buy and push and whatever all you want and it won’t make a difference.”
His presentation cited the Ariel laundry detergent that P&G with a “beautifully crafted film” created to show men in India that it’s not just women who should shoulder certain types of housework. “It makes Ariel meaningful,” notes Pritchard.
In the case of the Always campaign, which began four years ago, P&G linked the concepts of feminine protection and the confidence so that women could confront “demeaning phrases like ‘like a girl,’ and be able to make ‘like a girl’ mean amazing things,” Pritchard says.
“So not only are they talking about the performance of Always, they’re also able to express their point of view about an issue that is meaningful to women and girls around the world,” he adds. “And that’s good. That’s good for the business and that’s good for society.”
The video-centric Always messaging—which has generated 550 million views and 25 billion impressions—is on its fourth installment. While it garners its share of organic awareness, P&G also pays to deliver it at key moments.
“We put a 60-second version on the Super Bowl of Always Like a Girl the same time we had it online and then actually broke it up into different pieces,” Pritchard says. “We had a Snapchat version that was six seconds.”
But it all started with an idea “so powerful people want to view it, they want to talk about, they want to write about it and then they’re taking action on it as well,” says Pritchard.
We interviewed him at the ANA Masters of Marketing annual meeting in Orlando. This video is part of a series produced at the conference. Beet’s coverage is sponsored by Cadent. For more videos from the series, please visit this page.
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