P&G’s chief brand officer, Marc Pritchard, has used yet another industry speech to give agencies another dressing-down.
Speaking at the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA) conference in London yesterday, Pritchard said he was worried by a decreasing lack of creatives in agency land – he now believed it was “less than half” – and called for agencies to “strip away anything that doesn’t add to creative output”.
After his speech, he told UK industry site Campaign that he would like to see agency creatives grow to “more like three quarters”.
Proctor also told the audience that P&G – the planet’s biggest ad spender – had slashed the money it spends on “wasted media” by half, having already reduced the figure by some 20 per cent.
Enacting John Wannamaker’s famous marketing principle, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted, but I don’t know which half”, Proctor said: “We’ve already saved 20 per cent in media waste across all mediums, and we’re going after the elusive 50 per cent that Wannamaker was seeking.
“In 2017 transparency exposed substantial digital waste and P&G brought matters into its own hands by voting with its dollars.”
He added that P&G had, in some instances, had reduced spend by as much as half with some big digital players and reinvested in “some of the better performing vehicles to deliver the outcomes we needed,” that had included e-commerce and TV.
