name. These products were typically judged to have compatible
attributes to the brand in question. This became known as an
umbrella brand. When working with Danone, I took part in end-
less discussions to decide which of the dozens of yogurt and des-
sert products could be brought under the brand’s banner. Those
not corresponding to the healthy profile of the brand, or those
seen as being too gourmet, were attributed to another brand.
This was back in the 1970s. It was only then that think-
ing began in terms of brand portfolios and, as a consequence,
of brand territories, essences, and equities. The brand was no
longer the same thing as the product. Little by little it gave
itself its own values, over and above those of the products it
had under its wing. Coca-Cola became much more than a soft
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drink, Levi’s much more than a pair of jeans, Nike much more
than running shoes.
The ultimate example of this is demonstrated by Virgin.
This brand stands by itself alongside the products and services it
offers. Richard Branson looked to enter markets that were sleepy,
protected, and paralyzed. He once said, “I love tackling lazy
industries.1” And so he invested in a multitude of activities that
had no other common thread than that they were all fossilized.
From music stores to mobile telecoms, from radio to a railway
company, from the airline industry to bridal salons, the only
common link between Virgin businesses is Richard Branson. He
is the brand.
Over and above the products they include, brands have
become assets in their own right.
A 2010 study by Millward Brown2 showed that for S&P 500
companies, intangible assets exceeded the value of their tangible
assets. Otherwise put, their trademarks, management systems,
and brands are now worth more than their factories and inven-
tories. And Millward Brown also found that among all of those
intangible assets, the brand often came at the top of the list. It
confirms that “the brand accounts for more than 30 percent of
the stockmarket value of these companies.”3
The job of marketing is therefore not only to drive sales, but
also to increase the value of the brand. Sales overnight and brand
over time. To achieve this, marketers must give more substance
to their brands. They need to do everything possible to unleash
their potential. They need to make their brands really matter.
In this part, the first three chapters are dedicated to disrup-
tive marketers who know how to do this. Marc Pritchard, Chief
Brand Officer of Procter & Gamble, an old-economy company,
is probably the most influential marketing person in the world
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today. Brian Chesky, founder and CEO of Airbnb, understood
early on the importance of the brand. He was ahead of the many
entrepreneurs of other big Silicon Valley companies. Lee Clow,
one of the most renowned creative minds of the advertising
industry, has always known how to make brands shine. For more
than 30 years, he has been responsible for Apple’s advertising.
The last two chapters focus on two women entrepreneurs
who are not really marketers in the conventional sense of the
term, but who certainly know how to give weight to their brand:
Oprah Winfrey and Arianna Huffington. Both have profoundly
disrupted their business environment and created highly valu-
able brands.
Chapter 13
Marc Pritchard
ON TRANSPARENCY, ACCOUNTABILITY,
AND CREATIVITY
at the end of 2017, Marc Pritchard received yet another
award, certainly among his most prestigious so far. Mar-
keting Week consecrated him as 2017 Marketer of the Year.1
It seems natural to me to acknowledge the chief brand officer
at Procter & Gamble, which is not just the world’s biggest
advertiser, but is also known as “the business school” for brand
managers. The Cincinnati firm has maintained the greatest influ-
ence on the world of marketing and advertising since it began
180 years ago. The Harvard Business School had still qualified
P&G as the absolute reference in marketing up until the end of
the last decade.
This unequivocal statement has been challenged because
things have since changed. For 10 years, P&G has traversed a
difficult period. It appeared for a while as if it had underestimated
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the exponential growth of e-commerce, as well as the explo-
sion of mobile phone use. Its sales suffered and it lost market
share. It had difficulty growing markets in which its brands are
category leaders. There are 16 of these markets where P&G is
number one, and in which it has brands with revenues exceeding
$1 billion.2
Critics have targeted P&G’s culture, which had permeated
every corner of the company. In July 2017, the Financial Times 3
stated clearly that the company’s culture was at the root of its
problems. In their view, P&G needed to become, as we discussed
in Chapter 4, more agile. I, however, do not believe culture
should be seen as the main source of the company’s problems.
For me, the problems P&G faces are more structural than cul-
tural. Far from being a handicap, Procter & Gamble’s culture
strikes me as being an essential asset. It can act as the lever to
help it make the necessary changes.
I have worked for nearly 30 years in agencies where Procter
& Gamble was a client and, through these relationships, I have
been able to closely observe certain elements of its culture. First,
I noted the degree to which rigor occupies a predominant place
in P&G’s approach to most things. I have never come across a
company that separates so meticulously fact from opinion. I can
also testify to the company’s integrity. Procter & Gamble does
not meddle with ethics. And finally, one can only applaud how
well staff members cultivate an internal sense of belonging, which
is based on the confidence they have in each other’s capacities.
All of these elements play a role in creating a strong feeling of
team spirit. To succeed in making the structural reforms needed
while staying true to its beliefs, the enterprise must have a solid
base—which is best provided by none other than its culture.
Day after day, Pritchard participates in the transformation
of his company, but he has also contributed to that of the
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entire industry. In my opinion, he has done this to a greater
extent than any other executive. His speeches are picked up
and commented on the world over. Two of them in particular
have created a major impact. One is a wake-up call, the other a
rallying cry. The first was delivered in Florida in January 2017 at
the annual congress of the Interactive Advertising Board (IAB).
He denounced the many shortfalls of online advertising and
made a series of propositions intended to shake up the market.
The other speech was delivered in 2010 at the annual conference
of the Association of National Advertisers (ANA). There, he
challenged businesses and their brands to raise their ambitions,
to give themselves a higher purpose. These two speeches, and
his numerous other interventions over the past 10 years, have
made Marc Pritchard one of the most listened-to personalities
in the world of marketing. According to Adweek, he has become
the “standard-bearer”4 of his profession, a title they bestowed in
September 2017.
Leading Change in the Marketing World
In the speech he delivered to the IAB Congress, Pritchard
exhorted the marketing industry to disrupt itself. He pleaded for
transparency in the digital world, vaunted the merits of mass one-
to-one-marketing, and encouraged the reunification of creative
and media. He considers these three elements to be essential for
achieving more effective and efficient brand building.
Pritchard decried the aberrations of the digital advertising
world. As years have gone by, his company measured how most
digital advertising is purely wasted. According to him, “As little
as 25% of the money spent in digital media actually made it to
consumers.”5
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He advises agencies to let go of “the archaic Mad Men
model.”6 In Pritchard’s view, the system of buying and selling
media is obsolete and not in sync with the tech revolution—
“antiquated,”7 as he describes it. He has lost patience not only
with advertising and media agencies, but also with the Internet
giants. His attack on them is unprecedented. He condemns the
almost absence of standard digital metrics and is astonished by
the lack of accuracy of the measurement tools that do exist. He
also takes a stand against fraud and lack of transparency, both
of which are especially prevalent in digital ad media. Finally,
Pritchard denounces the unique threats to brand safety that exist
online. Brand messages can unintentionally turn up on sites that
contain violent, heinous, or sectarian content.
Pritchard has initiated a collective movement to clean up
what he calls the “murky media supply chain.”8 He incited all
those in the marketing sector to rally around five objectives:
1. The adoption of homogeneous viewability standards
2. The verification of audience measurement by an accredited
third party
3. Transparency in agency contracts
4. The eradication of fraudulent practices
5. An absolute vigilance in matters of brand safety
“P&G is taking action because it’s good for consumers, good
for our business, and responsible for the industry,”9 he concludes.
His demands have met with real resistance, in part because they
challenge the business models of Internet giants. Despite this,
Pritchard obliged the largest Internet companies such as Google
and Facebook to better respect marketers’ needs and forced them
to open their “walled gardens.”10 As he underlined, the fact that
“P&G is the world’s largest advertiser does carry some respon-
sibility, but it also carries some opportunity.”11 The weight of
Procter & Gamble did count.
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Pritchard’s second big subject is mass one-to-one marketing.
The exponentially growing volume of data, and analysis tech-
nologies to exploit it, will allow “mass reach, with one-to-one
precision.”12 Investments in data management platforms permit
sharper targeting, avoiding what Pritchard calls the “spray and
pay”13 approach to media. We have fully entered into the era of
one-to-one marketing. A promised capability of digital, but not
yet delivered, can finally be realized.
Highly precise marketing consists of analyzing every step
consumers take along their path to conversion, and influencing
them when they are at the moment closest to purchase. P&G
works with Amazon’s consumer ID database to ensure that its
brands reach consumers at just the right moment. The goal is to
compress the time between the moment consumers first inter-
act with a brand and the moment they are ready to take action.
More than 10 years ago, Marc Pritchard presciently professed
that “every consumer touchpoint should connect to purchase.”14
Pritchard’s third subject of concern is the entrenched dis-
tance between media and creative. He judges this to be counter-
productive. In the digital era it makes no sense to disassociate the
medium from the message. Despite being part of a company that
once encouraged the unbundling of media and creative, Pritchard
now believes that the two should be reunited. I remember him
telling me, “In the nineties, we made the wrong trade-off.”
Regardless of the enormity of the task, reuniting media and
creative is as vital for our industry as the digital transformation
of its agencies. More and more of our clients demand it. Every-
thing has to be brought together—media with creative, data with
strategic planning.
I’m now coming to a concept that for decades was rarely asso-
ciated with the Cincinnati company: creativity. P&G was known
in the past for its inflexible marketing approach. It favored ads
that were repetitive and stereotyped—but in the 2000s, it finally
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came to realize the importance of creativity. Around that time,
P&G hit a turning point and changed its creative philosophy. As
resolute as it was unexpected, the change eventually led to P&G
being frequently awarded with Lions at Cannes. The company
knew that, in the Internet era, any message that doesn’t contain
an element of entertainment is zapped or just ignored. Creativ-
ity, previously seen as optional by the company, became an obli-
gation. What had always been considered superfluous had finally
become essential.
This shift soon bore fruit. The Old Spice campaign “Smell
Like a Man, Man” was universally well received. The corporate
film “Proud Sponsors of Moms,” a tribute to athletes’ moth-
ers, the unsung heroes of the Olympics, was a smash hit during
the Vancouver Winter Olympics. These two campaigns helped
Procter & Gamble be named Advertiser of the Year at Cannes
in 2008. I was asked to make a speech at this festival. I called it,
perhaps not surprisingly, “The Beauty of Big,” and the theme
was how big companies were matching, if not beating, small
ones when it came to creativity. Since then P&G has not lost
its touch, as is attested by the Tide Super Bowl campaign which
in June 2018 was awarded the Grand Prix in the film category,
again at Cannes.
Most consumers only have a few occasions to see online
advertising messages, although a tiny fringe of the population
is continually exposed. Pritchard sums up this observation with
these words
: “We had been reaching too few people too many
times with too many ads.”15 In an environment where frequency
is too low, only impact can compensate. Otherwise put, it takes
creativity for ads to be effective. You only have to see the Old
Spice or Tide films once to remember them. And they are so
original that web surfers have given them a lot of mileage. In my
first book16, I explained that only the strength of the idea will
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compensate for the inevitable diminishing of frequency. Thirty
years later, here we are.
Pritchard called P&G’s fight to eliminate waste in the dig-
ital media supply chain a thorny and painstaking task he could
have done without. But he is persuaded that the five measures he
encouraged the business to take have helped clean up the area he
describes as “crappy advertising.” 17 Because of this, he feels we
may now be ready for a true explosion of creativity. This echoes
his plea made at the October 2016 ANA’s annual Masters of
Marketing Conference in Orlando, where he encouraged mar-
keters to “create the very best advertising the world has seen.”18
Making Brands Serve a higher purpose
The marketing industry needs its own sense of purpose to create
positive change across society as a whole. This was Pritchard’s
message to marketers at the Advertising Week conference in
New York in October 2018. In a message that echoed the ANA
speech he gave eight years earlier, he came back to the concept of
purpose into the world of marketing. The idea itself was not new;
Peter Drucker had evoked it 40 years ago. Other companies be-
fore P&G had also referred to it by then. But Pritchard is of those
who has given new energy to the concept. He concurs with Rich-
ard Branson, who recently declared, “Brands that will thrive in
the coming years—both financially and in terms of their impact
on the globe—are the ones that have a purpose beyond profit.”19
For almost 10 years now, P&G has given itself the purpose of
“Touching lives, improving life.”20 The company is committed to
spreading this purpose across the globe, now and for generations
to come. The phrase might seem a bit generic, but the company
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genuinely thinks differently about its role in the world today. P&G
wants to have a voice that counts on important matters such as
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