Procter and Gamble:  Searching and Reapplying

Early on in my career I went to an industry event and got talking to the other agency media heads working on other elements of the Procter account.  One, Saatchi’s John Perriss, gave me advice I’ve remembered to this day.  Procter and Gamble, he said, was the best client in the world.  They believed in advertising, they spent loads of money, they believed in paying their agencies properly and they were extremely loyal.

I remembered this when helping my agency (Leo Burnett) win AOR assignments around the world, when I was offered a job by Aegis (whose CEO, Sir Crispin Davis, was at P&G and who I’m sure was more impressed that I had Procter experience than he was by anything else I had ever done), and when I read in a recent edition of The Drum newsletter that their current CMO Marc Pritchard (pictured at top) is now officially “an advertising legend.”

We all have our Procter anecdotes.  First off, the name.  It’s spelled with an “er,” not an “or.”  I once made that mistake and was corrected by being told to remember “cleaner, whiter, Procter.”

Then when I was at Carat (then most definitely not a Procter agency) I was asked if I would put together a team to come and present on how we saw “the next 20 years of media.”  Any thoughts I had on how I was about to become a massive hero by winning the business were dashed when I was then told this: “This is not a pitch, you will not win business, you are not to sell, and we will pay you a fee plus expenses.”

Finally, when lunching with them after our “futures” presentation they asked me if I thought they should invest in what was then referred to as “satellite TV.”  I started off on the pros and cons of Sky only to be stopped and told very politely that they meant “invest in” as in “buying our own satellite station.”

Of course, more recently it was Procter and Marc Pritchard who gave oomph to the transparency debate that has reshaped agency finances, and who laid out the conditions he expected from the major platforms before committing to them.

The Procter mantra always used to be “search and reapply.”  In other words, find what works, then do it again.

Not everything they do (or Marc does) comes good, of course, but in The Drum piece Pritchard makes the point that even after close to 40 years in marketing he never stops learning.  It’s a welcome antidote to those who think that they know everything, and that this gives them permission to never stop telling.

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