Marc Pritchard, Procter & Gamble

W ith the advent of digital, a lot of companies pushed out a lot of content, trying to be part of this new world of real-time marketing. All that did was add to the clutter and noise.

So we raised the bar on creativity, reinforced messages of brand performance, and that cut through the clutter a lot better.
 
Technology can confuse you if you let it. If you just focus on what’s the best message and how you can consistently express it across [media] platforms, you’ll be OK.
 
We’re selective on the [sports] sponsorships we do have: Olympics, NFL and to a lesser extent MLB.

Photo by: GETTY IMAGES

Olympics and the NFL are a great mix for us, and they have both been very effective. For both, the reach is unbelievable, and customer activation is high.

The NFL is over a longer season, and playoffs and Super Bowl are when you see incredible numbers. The Olympics are just about two to three weeks, so you have to build to that period.

We haven’t completed all our research yet on the Rio Olympics, but I can tell you that our brand equities all increased, so we got the kind of awareness we were looking for. We’re also feeling very good about the amount of activation we were able to generate at retail.
 
Spending working dollars is the key for us. We’d rather spend money on sponsorship activation than a sponsorship fee.
 
If someone else was looking to enter the sponsorship space for the first time, I would tell them make sure you have activation dollars and that they will support a program that drives retail traffic.

For this budget cycle, we’re looking at continuing to improve reach and continuity for our media buys. The other thing that’s top of mind for us right now is point of entry: When does a consumer enter a particular category?

If we can get better at knowing precisely when that is, we can get more trial. We’re also focusing much more on the in-store experience. We don’t talk about it much, but retail presentation and in-store marketing gets more important every day.
 
We’ve seen that great advertising is associated with growth. But it’s got to be about balance. If you turn up the dial and you don’t have great advertising, that doesn’t work, and if you have great advertising and you don’t have the [media spend] dial up enough, that won’t work either.
 
I don’t think anyone is as good a marketer on mobile as they’d like to be yet, but one thing we do that I like is that we’ve decided that in some cases, we can have an effective ad that’s under three seconds.

There’s a three-second Tide video with a white dress before and after a red wine stain is removed. That’s a powerful message.

A lot of the discussion around digital media is about micro-targeting. What we’ve found is that if you get precise, we don’t reach enough people, so normally we are looking for mass reach with the ability to be precise on certain targets as needed.

Tide is for everyone that does laundry. With Pampers, we are looking for pregnant women and moms with babies. With all the digital choices now, I’d say that is easier.

We worked with most of the biggest social media companies to get broader reach. We were targeting too narrowly through social in some cases, but now we feel good about knowing how people behave on social media and reaching a wider target.
 
For anyone knocking on our door [to sell P&G a sponsorship], what we need to know about is reach, frequency and a plan to build value and business together. We don’t always get that.
 
I’d like to see us all get behind better advertising that can be a force for good. Our voices can be used to address important matters, like gender equality, racial bias, diversity and inclusion, and environmental sustainability. Our ads can promote positive conversations, demonstrate positive role models, influence attitudes and change behavior to make the world better.