P&G to review all of its relationships with ad agencies

By

Barbara Santamaria

Published
Feb 1, 2017

P&G has decided to stop paying for any digital ads, tech or agency services that don’t meet its standards and will review all of its ad contracts this year as it claims the “media supply chain” has become non-transparent and fraudulent.

Speaking at a conference in Florida the company’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard said: “We accepted multiple viewability metrics, publisher self-reporting with no verification, outdated agency contracts, and fraud threats – with the somewhat delusional thought that digital is different and that we were getting ahead of the digital curve. We’ve come to our senses.”

In his speech Pritchard laid out a four-point plan designed to gain back control over the quality of ads and generate growth.

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Among others, Procter and Gamble plans to adopt the MRC-validated viewability metric and third-party verification, which it hopes will help it “conduct business transparently and comparatively across all platforms”.

The retailer said it spends “enormous amounts of time” trying to understand, analyse and explain the differences between Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Pinterest, Pandora, YouTube and the dozens of viewability standards claimed to be the right metric for each platform.

“The human mind can register an image into memory in 0.25 seconds. Regardless, it doesn’t matter enough to warrant the complexity and the tremendous resources spent to deal with the differences. We’d rather spend time working on better advertising than debating the viewability standard with another publisher or agency,” said Pritchard.

With its brands Tide, Tampax, Pampers, Olay, Gillette, Braun and Herbal Essences and Pantene Pro-V, P&G is one of the world’s biggest advertisers.

The company is now asking retailers and industry players to join the campaign and help improve online marketing standards.