Editor’s Note: The following two articles about industry innovators are from Marketing Week and MediaPost, respectively.
P&G’s Marc Pritchard has turned his attention to cutting out the layers of complexity that he believes exist within the agency model. He said marketers have been “steadily outsourcing work to agencies,” but he believes this needs to stop because there are now “too many touchpoints” between marketers and the consumers they serve.
“We need P&G people much closer to the consumers they serve and we need fewer project managers and more brand entrepreneurs. This means renewed partnerships to work with agencies, not through them. We’ll pay for what creates value for consumers, and discern what work should be done by P&G people versus agency people,” he explained.
P&G has already outlined plans to cut the number of agencies it works with. That has also led to more work, such as media planning, being brought in-house. And Pritchard said that is also the case when it comes to media buying, with P&G now doing more private marketplace deals in-house.
“If entrepreneurs can buy digital media, why can’t the brand team on Tide, Dawn and Crest be entrepreneurs and do the same? They can, and they will,” he warned.
That isn’t to say P&G is looking to cut all aspects of its agency relationships. Pritchard said the company still needs brilliant creatives and is prepared to invest in that talent. But he called out the amount of time spent servicing the relationship, the “excess management, buildings and overhead” and the energy expended on unnecessary conference calls and meetings.
“It’s time to disrupt the archaic ‘Mad Men’ model, eliminating the siloes between creatives, clients and consumers, and stripping away anything that doesn’t add to creative output,” said Pritchard. That means an end to huge fixed contracts, with P&G instead implementing a “fixed-and-flow model” that sees a fixed amount spent on big campaigns, and other resources brought in as and when they are needed.
The model is already delivering results, said Pritchard, highlighting its work with Publicis on SKII’s “Change Destiny” campaign, and its work with multiple local agencies and in-house resource to create viral videos that run alongside it.
There is one final area where Pritchard wants to see change, and that is in reuniting creative and media. While he admits there were good reasons for separating the two functions at the time, such as creating “greater scale in TV and print buying,” he thinks it has now led to extra complexity and cost. “Through data and analytics, we can now bring media and creative back together for more growth with greater efficiency.”
Vizard, S. (2018, March 1). P&G’s Marc Pritchard Calls for an End to the ‘Archaic Mad Men Model’. Marketing Week.