ORLANDO – Earlier this year, Procter & Gamble cut $100 million from its digital advertising budget because of long-running concerns about the integrity of the media ecosystem. It was “kind of a pretty big move” that nonetheless paid off because the company still grew and met its objectives, according to Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard.
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.
