The Effective CMO: Procter & Gamble's Marc Pritchard

0:09Welcome back to the WALK podcast. I'm Anna Hamill, Senior Editor at WALK. Today we have another episode of The Effective CMO, where we ask the big questions to marketing leaders at some of the world's most interesting brands. Today we're joined by Marc Pritchard, Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble. Mark Pritchard is one of the most influential leaders in marketing. It's a rare event in a time of shortening CMO tenures to have a bird's eye view on the transformation of marketing and advertising from one single company. And Mark Pritchard has seen it all in his 40 plus years at Procter & Gamble.

0:44Since 2008, he's been in global marketing leadership roles, including his current role, Chief Brand Officer, since 2014. Mark has so many industry accolades, I can't name them all in this intro, but for some of the highlights include the American Advertising Federation Hall of Fame, the American Marketing Association Hall of Fame, and Chairman of the Board at the Association of National Advertisers, just to name three. Before we chat to Mark, here's a quick message from today's sponsor. Retail media continues to grow, but marketers still struggle to measure its wider business impact. Research by Sukarna revealed that 75 % of CPG retail media campaigns drive impact beyond the initial retailer, but fewer than 20 % of marketers measure those effects holistically.

1:31With AI-powered marketing mix solutions like Liquid Mix, Surkana helps brands move beyond siloed reporting to better understand incrementality, cross-channel impact, and the true business value of retail media. Download the latest insights today at surkana.com forward slash walk.

1:54mark pritchard joins us now mark welcome to the what podcast it's a delight to be here anna i want to kick off as we always do on the effective cmo with the first question that we ask every marketing leader who does this podcast what is your personal philosophy on marketing effectiveness what does that phrase mean to you well it's a pretty simple answer which is marketing effectiveness means your brand is driving growth and creating value. And you have to create value for both the consumers that you're serving as well as for whatever the brand is in the company and the investors that you have and the employees and those who are actually expecting to get something out of that brand.

2:41So the way we measure it is we look at, are we growing the market? Are we growing market share? Are we growing users? Are we growing sales? Are we growing profit? We actually call it the five-fecta. Not the trifecta, the five-fecta. And we award every year the brand and country combinations that achieve that five-fecta, and we actually choose the very, very best to be able to recognize. But it's a pretty simple answer. If marketing is not driving growth and creating value, you're not doing good marketing. So that doesn't sound like a philosophy. That sounds like a culture of effectiveness. Is that right?

3:25Absolutely. You know, I'm always surprised when I get the question of how do I convince my CFO or CEO that marketing matters? Whenever I hear that question, I think very simply, you just need to ensure that you demonstrate that the activities that you're doing and the investments that you're making to build your brand are creating those specific measures. And you do that, you're creating value for the company and you're creating value for the consumers that you serve. When you do that, your brand will endure. And it's why we have so many brands that have been around for literally decades and continue to get bigger and better every year.

4:07Yeah, that's really interesting. Your focus on brand growth through brand building has, in many ways, it's defined your career. You've said previously that P &G, of course, doesn't believe in brand life cycles. It's about brand building and building momentum. And that's something that we talk about a lot at WALK in terms of the foundation of how to build brands. Over the course of your marketing career, how has your point of view on the foundations of brand building evolved as the industry has transformed? Because the expectations on marketers within any business have also evolved as the industry has transformed.

4:42Yeah, actually, the foundations, the fundamentals have really not evolved very much because the fundamentals of brand building are as enduring and are the same as when William Cooper Proctor and James Gamble came to the banks of the Ohio River and got together to be able to create star candles and ivory soap. The fundamentals are you understand who your consumer is or who you're serving, whether it be a customer or whoever your brand or service will be serving. You understand what their needs are so you can meet those needs. You have to define then what your brand stands for. What is the brand's benefit?

5:28What performance is it providing to those consumers? then you have to bring that to life in the product or the service that you have. And in our case, it's in a superior performing product, superior performing package. Brand communication is going to create the awareness and trial that's necessary to be able to build that brand. We go through retailers, so it's a connection to retail execution in terms of how people buy the brands. And all that comes together at a price that will represent a superior value. So we call it the who, what, how brand building framework that is enduring. And it has been through our entire history that has been at the foundation of everything we've done.

6:15But what has changed is how you deliver that. And what has changed is dramatically different. You know, back in 1837, there were storefronts. You went to the general store. um then then then you went through um uh big supermarkets over time then now it's e-commerce back then it was word of mouth or a sign uh that that that on on the storefront then it was newspapers then it was radios and it was tv then it was digital and now it's it's uh it's turning into the ai world is is transforming that so you know the the what or the state is the same the how changes. And what brand builders need to do is always evolve, constantly change how you're doing building your brands in order to be effective.

7:08Really good advice. I want to jump into media because nearly a decade ago, you led the charge on media transparency and cleaning up the digital ecosystem, which prompted the major platforms to make changes. 10 years has been a huge amount of change in the digital landscape since then. And today we're seeing even more fragmentation of digital media, more channels, but also more risks emerging like online misinformation as a brand safety concern, the mixed impact of generative AI tools. These are all things that are facing marketers. What positive changes have you seen in media transparency since that call to action?

7:46And where do you believe the industry still has work to do? Well, I think one thing that's important to just step back for a moment is the fact that you said something at the very beginning, which is media has continued to exponentially fragment. And, you know, again, if you go back to the way it used to be, when I started, it was pretty easy because it was essentially TV and print and a little bit of radio. Now it's just atomized across so many different ways in which you can connect with consumers. So digital 10 years ago seemed like a big deal, but now it's much greater than that. And then you add on top of that, turbocharge that with AI, and you now create an additional level of both fragmentation as well as just information and misinformation that can connect with consumers.

8:36The transparency part, I think, has made significant progress. So back when we pushed on those transparency initiatives, and it was about ensuring that we could understand when we invested any media in whatever platform it may be, that we got some kind of a measurement as to how many people were we reaching, at what frequency, and how, to the extent we could figure out, how effective was it. by putting some core standards in place, everybody's adopted that. So that's just very foundational. What I would say, the still missing link is a sales signal. So you actually know that when I invest a dollar in media, that it actually produces a sale and I can find that attribution.

9:26And that still is a very elusive target. And the good news is, is that with the advent of retail media, with the advent of e-commerce, digital commerce, we're getting a lot closer to be able to get that. But that's the final piece. We've described it before as we're still kind of driving with frost on the windshield. You can't exactly see, you kind of know the direction you're going, but you can't exactly see where exactly you're going. By getting that sales signal that is connected back to the actual media ad or format that you put out there. When we get that, then we will have full transparency and that will have an exponentially positive effect on investment and on helping people build brands more effectively.

10:17Are these emerging technologies such as retail media and how fast is it growing? Are the opportunities that retail media offers your team starting to shape where you think about placing your bets in terms of media investment? Absolutely, because one of our major initiatives is brand communication. Part of our brand transformation, brand building transformation, is about how our brand communication connects directly to commerce. and with the advent of digital commerce as well as retail media, we now have the ability to do that, whether it be communication in your brand's voice, whether it be an expert like a creator or an influencer, whether it be a consumer, we are always striving to make sure it's connected to commerce.

11:08So at a digital commerce site, a retail site, and then that makes it an obvious place to invest is in retail media. And over time, when we get this sales signal, that will allow us to do even more because we'll be able to optimize it and optimize it to be able to get better outcomes that come from those investments. We're probably furthest along on this actually in China and where more than 60 % of our business is in digital commerce and you have both online retailers as well as offline retailers. But that flywheel is actually working pretty effectively and it's helping us grow our business there.

11:55I see that coming rapidly to the U.S. as well as Europe and we're seeing it in Asia, Middle East and Africa as well as Latin America. So, but that's the future. What have you been able to learn from the China example around retail media that you can apply to other markets as it grows? Back again to the fundamentals, you still need to create awareness of your brand. You still need to create memories. So memory structure, which is what allows people to remember your brand when they think of a category. But you also need to make sure that you create memory in the algorithm. So what we've learned is that you need a much higher volume of content, a much higher variety of content at a much higher velocity.

12:46And you need to do that, though, grounded in a brand, a truth, a consumer insight, as well as something, a moment that matters for consumers. So you can talk about it in your own voice as a brand, and you can get creators and influencers to talk about it, and you can actually get consumers to talk about it, because that then creates this flywheel, so to speak, of the volume, variety, and velocity of content. And then it connects directly to the Alibabas of the world, the Jingdong and the Doyin, which is basically TikTok. And that all comes together in a very integrated end-to-end ecosystem and allows us to drive growth and value creation.

13:35So that model is the same model that we're applying around the world.

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14:20Yeah, it's super exciting times for all of this integration to come together. And it feels like just from talking to you, that is something that you're really excited and optimistic about. It's very, I have never been more excited about brand building. You know, this is, and I've been around for a while. And I've never seen the pace of change as fast as it is right now. And, you know, and that's always been one of those things every year say, my goodness, everything's going so fast. Well, I've never seen this pace of change, but I've never been more excited about the potential opportunities associated with it.

14:57Yeah, a really exciting time. So with that, let's get into AI. It is, of course, 2026. It will not be an interview unless we spoke about AI. But you did allude to some of the work that you're doing in LLMs. Have you been able to transfer any lessons from previous digital transformations at P &G to adapting for this new AI era in marketing? Yeah, I think what, you know, the way we view AI as a incredibly wonderful set of tools that allows us to be able to build our brands in a better, faster, more effective way. So I described that volume, variety and velocity of content. In order to be able to do that, you need the aid of AI to be able to, at least in your own voice, what we create in the brand's voice, you need AI tools to help you crank those out.

15:53I mean, look, you're talking about, you know, 10 to 40x the amount of content that we produce ourselves. And we're now able to do that more in-house, aided by AI tools. You know, a really good example that I love is Pantene in Europe. When we went to a retailer, we were selling them actually a UV protection for skin. And they said, hey, we have a, what about hair? And we said, okay, well, let's see if we can do that. Yeah, we can do UV protection with hair. They gave us basically four months for us to get this ready. We went back. We used our data and our AI tools to create some insights, a concept, a prototype ad, a prototype package in basically a few days.

16:45then we did a one-day shoot, cranked out this 5x volume of our own content, then went to creators to create more content from them, and then we went to retail to create the e-content, and lo and behold, within a few months, we were in market with a market-leading product called Sunkist Glow Spray, which was amazing on Pantene. That was enabled by AI, and that's the way we are seeing these tools help us. You mentioned LLMs, of course. That is a big part of brand building today, which is now we need to make sure that when someone looks for something, that when they search for something, even an idea, sorry, a product itself or something that'll help them improve their lives.

17:42We want our brands to show up. We want it to be visible and we want it to be also favorable and accurate. So another good example is this is another Pantene example. When they assessed where they were on the key things that people wanted from hair care products like Pantene, which is they want to repair damage. We were way low on the LLM visibility, but they quickly started working on developing some content for their website as well as studies that we have done and boom lo and behold within just a few months they cranked up and got within the top five and then got to number one so that's the kind of speed with which you can use AI to be able to build your business yeah super interesting you mentioned briefly just before that you'd in-housed some of the work around that.

18:35I know that you've in-housed some stuff around media in particular, content creation and testing, those types of things. Has that sped-up innovation pipeline been a major benefit of in-housing some of those operations? Absolutely. You know, if you think about what does the old world look like, the old world looked like you'd do some consumer research, you'd come up with a concept you test that concept you'd retest the concept you'd come come back and then you'd brief the agency once you brief the agency they came back with storyboards then you get comments on the storyboards over and over again and then you finally produce something and then you put a media plan together to put it out there and then you went and talked to the retailers to tell to tell them to make sure they gave you enough display and shelf space that could take a year.

19:27No, those days are gone. It did take a year. It took longer than that. Took longer than that. Right. It was a very, what we call a batch process, one piece at a time, very, very slow. With the tools that we have now, and both combining both the data that we have, as well as the AI tools and the knowledge about how things work and how you build brands, where we've now been able to create this full suite of tools that enables us to do a lot of that in-house in basically days and weeks versus months and years. So it includes the consumer insight work that I was describing earlier and the concept work.

20:06Then it includes creating the content, the advertising and the content. It includes creating then media planning connected then to our retailers, as well as the influencer and creator ecosystem, as well as consumer UGC ecosystem. All of that now is done in basically we're creating in-house studios that enable us to do that. China is already there, rapidly picking that up in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Best example I can give you today is in our beauty business. They have this thing called a content house that is the full ecosystem. And that enabled them to be able to rapidly, you know, 10 to 40x their volume of content and effectiveness as well to build businesses like the Secret Deodorant brand, Old Spice, Olay, Body, Native, and now they're expanding to Olay and others.

21:09Yeah, really interesting. So as someone who has led P &G's marketing teams through periods of transformational change before, I'm thinking like the rise of social media, as you mentioned, creators, what is your advice to leaders about building an enduring culture of marketing effectiveness while also navigating all of that change because it really does feel like the pace of change is faster than it's ever been. I would say the most important aspect of culture is an obsession with the consumers you serve. Obsession with understanding everything you possibly can about their lives, what moments matter to them, what their needs are, what their problems are, their tensions, and then immersing yourself on a day-to-day basis, on a minute-by-minute basis.

22:02So essentially acting as if you were a direct-to-consumer founder, even if you're on a big brand. So you live serving that consumer, and you also deeply understand everything about your brand because what you have to do is you have to make sure that you not only understand what the consumer wants or needs, and then you have to connect that with what your brand can provide. And then you have to find that moment or that little piece of their lives that you can make it both their need and your brand matter. And that's when you create a great brand idea. So that culture of constantly thinking about how you can build this brand, that is a differentiating element.

22:55And when you do that, then you are automatically looking at every possible change that might come about and you're making sure that you are capturing the latest and greatest new way of doing things. I want to go back to what you said about the volume of content that is now required to kind of feed the beast, I suppose, in the digital world and especially the algorithms. But there's now multiple research papers coming out. Walk recently released some research around this. Creative X has done an amazing data set that they released at Can about this, basically indicating that AI tools are increasing content volume, as you mentioned, but also that that velocity of content is negatively impacting effectiveness.

23:40Basically, there's vastly more digital content assets being produced, but media budgets aren't necessarily increasing to match that. So average spend isn't high enough to drive the reach to get actual marketing effectiveness in the way that we understand effectiveness principles previously. I'm interested to see how you're navigating the balance between those things. is the velocity of content that you now need to put out in the world to be successful in these new areas. Are you changing and evolving your media strategy to reflect that? Yeah, we're evolving and obviously we're also constantly learning as well.

24:17So, you know, what I would say is that what we have learned is that if you think about those voices that I described that you need in terms of the content. You need the brand's voice, which is typically, that's going to be your 30-second ad, 15-second ad, six-second ads, posts, and so forth. It's sometimes called paid media. That brand's voice, then there's the expert voice, which would be creators and influencers, and then there's the user-generated content voice, user voice. For the brand's voice, which is where you're buying media, you still have a fairly large amount of just awareness building advertising and media communication.

25:02So there's still plenty of video opportunity out there to reach people where they're watching something. They're watching entertainment, whether it be streaming or linear or sports or other places. So there's still that component. In the social world, unpaid, you've got to accelerate the content because over time, once your brand has been seen, your ad has been seen multiple times, consumers start flipping through it a lot quicker. And when they start flipping through it, that algorithm is very sensitive. They know, oh, they're not paying as much attention to it. So it starts to reduce the effectiveness of that ad from an algorithm standpoint.

25:44So what you have to do is you have to bring something back and bring something, a new twist to be able to go. So that's where you get that exponential higher level of paid volume. And it also likes variety as well. Now, when it comes to influencers and content creators, what that involves is understanding. Now you have the ability to understand a range of people you're trying to appeal to with a brand. And then you can break that down into creators who can actually talk about your brand in a way that may appeal to those specific groups of people. And that requires a large range of creators. So that's where that content comes about, and they need to be talking all the time.

26:34And so that volume and variety comes out of that full range. And then it still has to be connecting that brand truth with that consumer insight with that moment that matters for it to be effective. So just because you put a lot out there doesn't mean it's effective, which is the point that you were making there. So that's why you have to keep experimenting, why you got to keep trying. And then once it is effective, it can be incredibly powerful. We had one example, which actually user-generated content from by Old Spice cereal griller body wash that we came up with. It was one of these Old Spice kind of programs where they wanted to do things that guys like to do, which is they like to grill stuff.

27:29We like to grill steaks and hamburgers and all that kind of stuff. And actually, grilled marshmallows was one that was interesting. And grilled marshmallows really smell good. They smell kind of vanilla-y. and this uh user we did like one or two ads but this user got a hold of it and he went crazy on this thing and it generated like millions of views instantly and that became then the marketing campaign and it was highly highly effective because of how how it really attracted attention on that particular brand, on that particular item. So that's the kind of new world that we're in right now is a lot of shots on goal so you can find the one that's going to be most effective.

28:21Yeah, that's a really fantastic World Cup analogy. Someone's been watching the soccer over the last few weeks. I think that's really interesting. Just going back to that CreativeX data set, The numbers that they shared with us were that 70 % of ads were allocated less than$1 ,000 in terms of media expenditure, and 93 % had media investment of less than$10 ,000. So that's 633 ,000 digital ads from Fortune 500 companies, a huge data set. But it sounds as though, hey, if the content is good, it's going to get through, but the content has to be good to get through. Right. And you need to have more shots at it is the point.

29:04So now what is the new challenge that comes ahead is how can I make sure that I get a higher percentage rate? which comes down to, coming back to, understanding your consumer, understanding their needs, coming up with ideas that connect the consumer insight with the brand insight, with the moment insight, and then creating the content, whether it be your own voice or a creator's voice or a user voice, that's going to be more effective as opposed to just throwing a whole bunch of stuff out there. You want to try to increase the effectiveness of the shot versus doing more and more and more because there's only so many you can do.

29:47Yeah, absolutely. I want to talk a little bit about the evolution of brand purpose over the last few years. Brand purpose was obviously a really hot talking point. And P &G was at the heart of that conversation in terms of linking business impact and socially conscious brands. The current political and economic climate means we're seeing fewer brands pursue that type of work, even though we actually saw some walk rankings analysis earlier in the year that showed that campaigns that tackle some of those issues remain among the most effective. That's from walk rankings top award winning campaigns.

30:21You've championed the concept of brand as a force for good and brand citizenship over the years. What tangible business impacts have you seen from P &G's commitment to being a force for growth and a force for good over many years? Well, I would say the most tangible impact is when it comes back again to the point I've been making is that if you have something that an insight that matters and connects with your brand, then you can do something like a always like a girl that can be incredibly effective. And that was just a classic example. The insight was that young women have a lot of issues when they're going through puberty from a confidence standpoint.

31:10One of them is obviously the changes in their bodies and hormones and periods. And the other is insidious comments like, you do that like a girl, which is essentially an insult. So flipping that into a celebration of Like a Girl with an absolutely brilliant campaign really brought that brand into the forefront and was viral almost before virality was super popular. Absolutely. It's an iconic campaign. It's one that we keep going back to years later. Correct. Yeah. And so but it's illustrative of the the the point of connecting the consumer, the brand of the moment. And and then over time, what we did is.

32:02Is continue to find those insights across different brands that that that could could could demonstrate that we were, you know, socially conscious, also environmentally conscious. and also, you know, it helped us be able to, what really started to move to is away from the equality and the social consciousness into serving a much broader range of consumers. So what I would say that probably one of the most significant effects of that overall movement made, call a purpose if you want, or the social movement, is that we move from being a general market type of approach, which is kind of a very broad, not very precise focus on individual consumers, to now being very, very precise on consumers based on their individual characteristics, whether they be demographic characteristics or even where they live, what their lives are like, what their race, gender, ethnicity, all those things.

33:17Those things all actually matter when it comes to our products, which are household and personal care products. So those characteristics make a difference. And by really understanding those diverse characteristics, now it allows us to be able to reach them and connect with them in a much more precise way. So it kind of moved into a different approach versus just being a force for good to being much more about a force for growth by meeting the needs of diverse consumers. Yeah, super interesting. And of course, a lot of Western markets, particularly North America, is only becoming more diverse as time goes on.

34:01So that's really interesting. What advice would you give to other CMOs navigating the tension between this type of work? And some of the CMOs we talked to off the record are a little bit anxious around this at the moment. It feels like a difficult time to be pursuing these types of things, even if they think it would be good for the brand for all of the reasons that you just discussed. What would your advice be to them about navigating that tension? You can stand on solid ground when you're really clear that what you're doing is, for your brand, matters to the people you're serving and in the moment that you're serving.

34:43So a culturally relevant festival for African-American consumers or Hispanic consumers or Asian consumers where your brands show up and are really focusing on how they're meeting those unique needs. And in our case, again, meeting their needs for hair care products, for skin care products, for laundry products. when you do that then basically what you're doing is this is good business you're essentially saying i'm meeting the needs of the consumers that i'm serving and i'm understanding what their needs are based on their characteristics of their lives and those characteristics matter in our in our particular business so you know if you're different genders and different races and ethnicities and different parts of the country you live in have an effect on your hair, have an effect on your skin.

35:43So, of course, then we're going to be able to tailor our Olay business and our Pantene and our Head and Shoulder and our Aussie businesses and our Miel business to those different needs. Some may call that something different than what we're intending, but what we're intending is meeting the needs of consumers. And basically that's good business. Yeah, for sure. My last question for you is some career advice to young marketers, because I think it's a really interesting time in the industry right now. Across the marketing and advertising industry, those entry-level positions appear to be disappearing in large numbers.

36:27And as someone who's had an incredibly successful and long career as a marketer, What advice would you give to young people looking to have a successful career in marketing right now? Well, I would say if I were starting today, I would be ensuring that I am super curious about a full range of skills and capabilities. It would not be just focused on marketing. In fact, I got a degree in finance and business, and then I started in finance and then evolved into marketing, had a little bit of a time working at a manufacturing plant for a couple of years, worked on information technology. So I had a pretty broad range of experiences.

37:15I would fast track that now if I were a young marketer or advise people to think about you're not just a marketer. You have to deeply understand market research and consumers. You have to deeply understand things like design. You need to understand public relations, communications, influencers and creators. You need to be creative. You need to understand how finance works so you can figure out how you can create value. and growth as well as growth on your business. You've got to understand the supply chain. You've got to understand retailers. So it's a very broad range of skills and capabilities.

37:58And so having that curiosity will enable you to be successful as you go into the business. Look, you've got to understand the fundamentals. So the tools that are in there today, that are out there today, yeah, they're going to eliminate some things, maybe some jobs that existed when I started. But look, you've got a continuous focus on understanding consumers and creating ideas and getting them in market. That's a lot of work. So there's plenty of work for people to do, but it does require you to be very curious and learn a wide range of skills. that's really good advice and a fantastic place to leave it Mark Pritchard thank you for joining us on the walk podcast thank you Anna it was a pleasure that's all we have time for on this episode of the effective CMO for the walk podcast thanks to Mark Pritchard for sharing his insights from nearly 40 years of working in marketing if you've enjoyed today's episode be sure to tap follow wherever you get your podcasts or share this episode with a colleague thanks for listening and see you next time Stop Trans backstage