“Mass disruption” is the biggest challenge facing the marketing industry today, according to Procter & Gamble’s chief brand officer Marc Pritchard.

From ongoing digital transparency issues and the rise of ad blockers to the emergence of direct-to-consumer startups taking on big brands, the marketing landscape is changing considerably so brands must “completely reinvent” in order survive.

“[Marketing] is being disrupted and it’s being disrupted in a big way. That’s why we call it mass disruption. Mass marketing is being disrupted and it’s being disrupted on a mass scale, so the focus and the challenge we have is how to reinvent, how to build our brands really fast,” he said, speaking at an event hosted by The Economist today (19 June) at Cannes Lions.

“We’re reinventing media from mass blast to mass one-to-one, we’re getting advertising from less push to more pull, we’re reinventing agency partnerships from less outsourcing to more of our people’s hands on the keyboard. We’re reinventing marketing to be a force for good and a force for growth.”

To address this disruption, last year P&G committed to reassessing its digital spend, cutting investment in 2017 across the major digital platforms by $200m.

Pritchard explained that P&G has not increased traditional media spend as a result, rather it has cut back on what he describes as “digital media waste” on the big platforms, which came to light as P&G gained greater transparency.

The knowledge that customers were viewing ads for less than 1.7 seconds, or that ads were being served to bots, spurred the FMCG giant to “take control of the situation” and “get smarter”.

This process has involved harnessing the anonomised data it holds on 80% of consumers in markets such as the US and China to create campaigns with mass reach, but one-to-one precision. In China alone, P&G has cut 30% of the waste across digital media and increased reach by 60%.

Confectionery company Mars currently spends 30-35% of its budget on digital media, a figure chief marketing and customer officer Andrew Clarke expects to increase once these platforms prove they can deliver.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.marketingweek.com