CANNES—Marketing has always been about performance, says Procter & Gamble’s Global Media Director, Gerry D’Angelo. So conversations should center not on brand marketing versus performance marketing but about “points on the scale.”
In this interview with Beet.TV at the recent Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, D’Angelo says he’s had “quite a number of interesting conversations about this and in preceding months where people will want to segment with a very hard line between performance marketing and brand marketing.
“And I think there’s a bit of an analogy also between digital marketing and analog marketing,” D’Angelo adds. “Those two things don’t exist in two kind of separate universes.”
In “very traditional advertising and marketing,” it was always about performance. “We were always trying to elicit a response from consumers.”
What’s different from half a century ago is that “the response was somewhat delayed and you didn’t have the immediate return path and ability for interactivity with consumers.”
D’Angelo believes that if marketers can maintain “that kind of holistic vision that there are points on the scale, I think that’s incredibly healthy.”
When it comes to campaign KPI’s, he notes that the vast proportion of P&G’s consumer packaged-goods sales still occur in brick-and-mortar stores.
“I think the key for us is to find ever concrete KPI’s that we can begin to measure consumer response. Whether that’s quality visits to our websites, appointments with beauty advisors in department stores or clicking to download a coupon. If we can continue to move along that spectrum I think we’re going to be in a good place.”
In a similar vein, D’Angelo talks about the “big bifurcation” between Game Of Thrones-like, extended long-form content “that plays out over a number of years” and very short video content on the other end of the scale.
“I think as advertisers, we should be inspired by that because the traditional workhorse of the thirty-second or the fifteen-second commercial I think is coming under scrutiny. I think we have to respond to that as advertisers and take note of the fact that consumers will want to be much more flexible in terms of how they’re consuming their video content and that we need to respond to that in kind.”
You can find all of Beet.TV’s coverage of Cannes on this page.
