There’s an axiom that behind great advertising is a great client. So if you believe in that adage, it’s only apropos that SHOOT’s Agency of the Year is Wieden+Kennedy and that our top Creative Marketer for 2010 is Procter & Gamble. Indeed Wieden’s strong showing this year is due in part to its portion of the P&G business–most notably Old Spice Body Wash’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” phenomenon which spanned television, social media, and old fashioned water cooler word of mouth to weave its way into mainstream popular culture, redefining the brand and serving to make it more relevant and contemporary.
W+K and P&G also teamed on Winter Olympics advertising which took on an atypical strategy with P&G not so much an Olympics sponsor but rather a “Proud Sponsor of Moms,” honoring the mothers of Winter Games Team USA athletes–and, in the big picture, moms everywhere. The results were off the charts for first-time Olympics sponsor P&G.
It doesn’t seem all that long ago that P&G was synonymous with stodgy advertising, part of that packaged goods purgatory for creativity. However, that perception ceased being reality a number of years ago.
In fact, P&G was named recipient of the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival’s Advertiser of the Year Award back in 2008. At that time, Cannes Festival chairman Terry Savage said, “Five years ago, Procter & Gamble made a public commitment to embrace creativity to drive their marketing. This public commitment was a message to their agencies and to the people who work in their agencies, and resulted in many thousands of column inches being written about this initiative in the world press. The vision materialized in 2007 when P&G won 14 Lions at Cannes, including the coveted Press Lions Grand Prix.”
Well, P&G can’t be accused of since resting on its creative laurels. “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” campaign scored this year’s Film Grand Prix at Cannes. Created for TV, the spot became a viral sensation and consumer favorite, generating more than 11 million views on YouTube. A follow-up social media campaign in which consumers asked questions of and received video responses from the smell good guy, former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa, proved to be a resounding success.
The bottom-line tally in July–the month after Cannes–showed Old Spice body wash sales double what they were the same time the prior year. The product became the #1 selling body wash.
This in turn had a halo effect on the overall brand as Old Spice deodorant sales which were also up significantly.
That’s entertainment
Reflecting the entertainment value of the campaign was the fact that later in 2010, “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like” won the primetime commercial Emmy Award.
But P&G had become an entertainment provider in more ways than Old Spice. This year also saw it spice things up on another front, teaming with Walmart to produce, bankroll and present three telefilms as part of the Family Movie Night on NBC.
The first motion picture was Secret of the Mountains which garnered 7.5 million-plus viewers when it aired in April, and then the DVD became the best selling made-for-television movie ever sold at Walmart.
The drama focuses on Dana James, a public defender and single mother who takes her family to visit a mountain cabin they inherited from their eccentric uncle, only to find themselves embarking on what become the adventure of a lifetime.
Then in July came the science fiction telefilm The Jensen Project on NBC. The “project” in the film’s title refers to a community of geniuses formed to help solve some of the world’s biggest problems. This community also enters the fight to prevent a new technology from falling into evil hands. The sci-fi movie starred LeVar Burton (Roots, Reading Rainbow) and Patricia Richardson (Home Improvement).
And earlier this month premiering on NBC was A Walk in My Shoes, which centers on a story of how families can come together against adversity. The slate of three films were part of an advertiser/marketer initiative to bring more family-friendly programs to television. Sponsoring and being associated with such fare that the entire family can watch together has obvious positive implications–and again underscores the need for savvy marketers to get involved in longer form projects be they telefilms, series, and web content. Walmart and P&G started the Alliance for Family Entertainment with some 40 prominent advertisers, including Pepsi, General Mills and Hasbro.
As a result of the first two movies, P&G brands experienced sales increases and received hundreds of letters from parents with positive feedback asking for more family-oriented programming. The latest movie featured a movie soundtrack produced by Randy Jackson, with music from up-and-coming artists such as Michael Johns, Judgement and Walking In Space. A Walk in My Shoes was supported with a fully integrated marketing plan designed to create an estimated 1.5 billion impressions leading up the movie’s airing. Walmart and P&G collaborated to create tune-in plans that span PR/media, social/influencer outreach, NBC promos, print, a word-of-mouth campaign, and digital components leveraging Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, P&G brands and Walmart resources. Walmart supported the movie through in-store messaging and its November 28 circular, which featured P&G brands. The day after the movie ran on NBC, a two-disc DVD and CD soundtrack were available exclusively at Walmart.
Plans call for P&G and Walmart to continue bringing family movies to TV through the Family Movie Night initiative in 2011.
$1 billion hike
As reported by AP, during a conference call with investors in August, P&G disclosed that its ad spending jumped $1 billion over the past year to $8.6 billion, the company’s highest total ever. Much of that investment went into supporting innovations of some of its biggest brands, like the June debut of Gillette Fusion ProGlide. It went to market at a suggested price of $10.99 for a handle and shaving head, 10 percent more than the prior Fusion. P&G officials said at the investors’ session that within two weeks, the new Fusion became the market leader.
The notion of boosting the advertising/marketing investment by a whopping $1 billion during a time of global economic recovery reflects a forward thinking mindset that sees opportunity in down times.
Yet at the same time, this doesn’t mean that money is thrown at media to yield results. Last week, during the Association of National Advertisers’ (ANA) first Creativity Conference, held in New York, James Moorhead, North American marketing, brand manager for Old Spice, noted that the brand’s media expenditures have actually decreased 15 percent since 2008.
Indeed impressions are up, media spending is down for Old Spice–seemingly an incongruity until one sees how the impact of a big thinking creative idea like “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” initiated on television the day after the Super Bowl, resonated digitally with and engaged the public.
Since February, there have been two billion-plus impressions for Old Spice which now sports the number one all time most viewed and most subscribed to brand channel on YouTube. The brand’s Twitter following has increased some 3,000 percent, Google search is up 2,000 percent, Facebook interactions have risen 800 percent and OS.com traffic has grown 300 percent.
Global reach
Expansive international thinking was another dynamic for P&G in 2010 with inexpensive Gillette shavers and versions of Tide detergent introduced in India, increased sales of Pampers in China and Brazil, and the introduction of Swiffer dusters to Israel.
P&G also extended its reach within the U.S., focusing on the Hispanic market, for example, for the launch of Gain dishwashing liquid.
And on the online front, P&G took hundreds of its consumer products directly to shoppers via a new website in 2010.
The site’s leaders described the endeavor as being a consumer research lab that will benefit the company and its retailers as P&G will share its findings on how shoppers respond online and in stores to digital ads, coupons, store promotions and other marketing incentives/stimuli.
Preferred vendors
P&G also made a mark–which some wouldn’t construe as necessarily positive–with its deployment of a preferred vendors list first reported on in 2009. The impact of that list has received mixed reviews in the production community. Gaining inclusion on such lists–which other select advertisers have devised as well–frequently entails production companies having to lock in prices for certain services and expenses. Production companies not willing to agree to such pricing arrangements would be off the list and supposedly not eligible for work.
From a business perspective, there’s some question as to what benefits a production house derives from being on a preferred vendors list. The concept clearly isn’t new but in its prior iterations at least offered more tangible advantages to a production company. For instance, SHOOT chronicled years ago arrangements whereby a client guaranteed a production house a set volume of work during the course of a year in exchange for certain economies. The client gained price stability while the production house knew it could count on a certain workload from a particular client.
However, there appears to be no such guaranteed volume of work for a production house that is on a preferred vendors list as it’s generally been constructed today. Furthermore there is no assurance of timely payment or cash flow on jobs that a preferred vendor takes on.
Plus there’s the notion that preference isn’t a given even if one is on a preferred list. Several in the production community have noted that it’s not uncommon for a client to go outside the list to secure a major production house and directorial talent for certain select projects.
Master of Marketing
Preferred vendors’ list aside, P&G scored impressively in 2010 on creative and strategic fronts. And perhaps best encapsulating the spirit that spawned such success–which manifests itself in such work as making Old Spice new again, and a slate of family movies–was a guiding tenet shared by Marc Pritchard, global marketing officer of P&G, during last month’s ANA Masters of Marketing event. “Think about the best way you can serve people and make their lives better,” said Pritchard. “This will lead to big insights that can improve your brand.”
