Whether it’s brand building, partnerships or media, Procter & Gamble is set on reinvention as the way to deliver better consumer experiences and drive growth in coming years, according to the CPG giant’s chief brand officer.

At CES 2020 in Las Vegas, Marc Pritchard told delegates that “the next decade will bring exponential changes in innovation and the greatest leap forward in creativity the world has ever seen”.

Business will have to respond accordingly. To this end, P&G is engaged in a process of reinvention across key points of its marketing activities – and it isn’t doing that by itself .

“We’re looking for ideas. We’re looking for technologies. We’re looking for partners,” Pritchard said. (For more details, read WARC’s report: P&G’s reinvention formula for advertising, partnerships, media and brand citizenship.)

How P&G deploys those partners is likely to differ markedly from previous years, as more media planning is done in-house (already the figure stands at nearly 30%) and creative is devolved to internal ‘brand entrepreneurs’ who work with small agile shops on specific projects.

“We’ve collapsed the time [associated with] creativity from months to hours,” Pritchard elaborated. “And we’ve created an entirely new model that brings multiple agencies into one integrated team we call ‘Woven.’”

For some brands, advertising creativity has been brought almost entirely in-house: antiperspirant brand Secret, for example, no longer has an agency of record, and is “spending a little as a tenth of what it had invested in agency creative services”, while the “production time has collapsed from five months to one month”.

A recent ad for the brand demonstrates his point. “The opening scene was [shot] in P&G’s home office. The producer was the associate brand director. The creative director was the brand manager.”

And the results indicate that this approach appears to be working. “Secret sales have consistently grown by mid-single-digits since we started in-sourcing the work,” he reported.

On a larger scale, he added, “reinventing partnerships has not only saved $1 billion over the last five years, it’s transforming our culture with more creativity, agility, and entrepreneurship.”

Sourced from WARC