Marc Pritchard, chief marketing officer of P&G, is planning to use the company's clout as the world's biggest advertiser to shape agency partners into a new collaborative model he believes will provide more bang for its buck.
This will be most noticeable at P&G Fabric, the group which includes the brands Ariel, Tide and Gain. Speaking at the 4A's Accelerate Conference on Monday in Miami, Pritchard announced that he is set to pilot three new agency models. Most eye-catching is a new creative shop led by Publicis but pooling talent from rival holding groups which will oversee creative for P&G Fabric North America from headquarters in New York.
According to The Wall Street Journal, talent from Publicis's Saatchi & Saatchi, WPP's Grey and Omnicom's Marina Maher Communications and Hearts & Science will collaborate under one roof in a yet-unnamed agency. Under Pritchard's ‘People First’ model, talent will be drawn from multiple (and traditionally competing) agencies – most of whom have already been working with P&G.
The new agency will be led by Saatchi & Saatchi New York chief executive Andrea Diquez.
The group, AdAge reports, will cover some $525m in North American ad spend. The focus on talent and especially creative will help drive the group towards having more creative-minded resources on the books at the brand. Pritchard is on the record as saying he would like creatives to account for as much of ‘three quarters’ of agency resources.
People First was first piloted for Tide’s Super Bowl work – four ads that were led by Stranger Things and Hellboy actor David Harbour.
During the presentation, Pritchard revealed another model dubbed ‘fixed and flow’ which puts new spend restrictions on agencies of record to leave a flexible pot for other ad hoc projects that require marketing budget, chiefly in the production space. Lastly Pritchard announced his 'Media' model – a plan to bring media buying powers inhouse – with an emphasis on digital. This builds upon Pritchard's public calls to slash ‘wasted’ spend in digital media.
Last year at 4A’s Pritchard underlined consolidation and simplification as a means of increasing the efficiency of operations and increasing the transparency around spend. He said the group had previously “fed the complexity beast by hiring thousands of agencies globally”.