MEDIA GROWS MARKETS

By Marc S. Pritchard – Chief Brand Officer at Procter & Gamble

MARKET is the most important part of marketing.

We operate and compete in markets. The consumers, customers, or clients we serve purchase goods and services in markets. And market is part of everyday language. Supermarket. Job Market. Stock market. Bear market. Bull market. Market basket. Market share. Farmers market. Media market.

The reality is MARKET MATTERS.

At P&G, growing markets is the highest order ambition—creating business versus taking business—making the size of the pie bigger. Growing markets requires innovation and creativity to attract more consumers into purchasing better performing products…delighting them by using more of those better products…and providing them with higher value offerings worth paying for. Growing markets is the growth that matters most to our retail partners…and contributes to broader economic growth and inclusion…which is good for business and good for society.

There’s a way of growing markets that doesn’t get the attention it deserves: MEDIA. Media grows markets yet is perhaps one of the most underrated and underused ways of accelerating market growth. It’s generally the largest spending element in the marketing mix and can have a significant impact on market growth—positive or negative—but is often considered an expense to be cut when there are profit problems. However, when done well, media investment is a revenue generator that can make markets bigger.

So, what happens when you have the mindset that media drives growth and value creation and follow a simple but clear framework for Superior Brand Communication? You raise the bar on media impact to realize its full potential for market growth.

P&G does this through a simple but clear framework—reach, effectiveness, and efficiency shared freely for others to apply.

Step 1: REACH. Achieve higher media reach and attract more people into the market. If you reach more potential consumers to make them aware of your brand’s offering, you’ll have a higher probability of attracting them into the market to purchase. That’s why at P&G we strive to reach ALL potential consumers in a market—not just a narrow target audience.

For P&G’s daily-use household and cleaning products, nearly all adults are potential consumers. Nearly 100% of adults want clean laundry. Nearly 100% want clean dishes. Nearly 100% brush their teeth. And nearly 100% wipe their…spills. It makes sense to try to reach as close to 100% of potential consumers in a market to accelerate growth. But even in the U.S., our largest and most developed business, we reach roughly 75% of adults on average across our categories. That’s up from about 65% five years ago, but it’s still not good enough because 25% are still not being reached.

P&G does have a few brands that are getting close to their media reach potential. Bounty reaches 85% and Tide reaches 90%. Pampers reaches 95% of households with babies in diapers. But we still have many brands reaching fewer than 50% of potential consumers.

Why do we miss out on so much reach? One reason is habits such as how media target audiences are defined. Why do we still consider the target audience of “women, ages 18-49?” Does that mean women over the age of 50 don’t do laundry or brush their teeth? Or that no adult men of any age use a laundry machine or toothbrush? Of course not. I’m not saying don’t use demographic target audiences, but think broadly—to grow markets, expand to reach all potential consumers.

We also see a significant opportunity to reach EACH segment of the adult population to bring in more users. For the daily-use cleaning, health and hygiene products P&G brands offer, the needs of consumers can be influenced by factors such as gender, age, race, ethnicity and other characteristics. So, to grow the market, it makes sense to reach as close to 100% of each group in resonant media programming.

We now regularly measure reach across multiple consumer segments. Today, in the U.S. we reach around 77% of Black consumers, 75% of White consumers, 66% of Hispanic consumers, and 59% of Asian-American consumers. That’s significant upside reach potential for each consumer segment, especially since 100% of growth in the U.S. market will be from multicultural consumers in the next decade.

That’s why we’re investing in and expanding the Black, Hispanic, and Asian owned, operated and targeted media markets. This helps us reach more of each consumer segment with resonant media programming where consumers are more engaged in programs made uniquely for them—and that can lead to a 17% to 38% sales lift according to ANA’s AIMM study. In the last four years, P&G brands have recognized this opportunity and stepped up to more than double spending in multicultural media and will continue to invest to expand the market because it is driving growth to help brands win with ALL consumers and EACH consumer segment.

Crest is a brand that has raised the bar on reaching all consumers and each consumer segment to grow. The Crest Reality Check Up campaign is centered on insights about everyday oral care realities that you don’t think about until your dentist gives you a reality check. Crest invested in multicultural media to achieve 80% media reach levels among all and each segment, including Black, Hispanic, White, and Asian consumer segments. Within months, the brand and market started growing—and it’s still growing with a lot of upside.

The call to action: Step up and increase reach among all potential consumers and each consumer segment.

Step 2: EFFECTIVENESS. Raise the bar on higher media effectiveness with advertising PROVEN to grow sales. Obvious, but a step often missed, as we can get distracted with other diagnostic and in-process metrics that don’t always lead to sales growth.

So, how do we prove what’s effective at growing sales? One way is through in-market testing. For example, Downy developed three different campaigns and tested each in three different markets at the same level of reach to see which did the best at driving sales. They landed on this beautiful campaign, Breathe Life into Laundry.

On social media, Swiffer PowerMop engaged multiple TikTok creators and brought them into our labs to learn about the new product with P&G scientists and created multiple executions for live testing to find the best executions that correlated with sales growth. They learned what engaged people to help create a video and TV campaign, then used a tool called AI Studios to optimize the Mop Smarter campaign.

Native personal care developed multiple campaigns for their premium clean deodorants and body washes. The team tested them on YouTube to find which ads gained the most engagement and led to brand and category sales growth through market mix modeling. They landed on the campaign, Everyone Has a Story to Smell.

The results? All these brands are proven effective at driving sales, which has given the brands confidence to invest in media to drive market growth.

But why do we miss out on investing in effective media? One reason is lack of measurement. Don’t get me wrong, a lot is measured. Media companies, platforms and measurement companies have multiple measurement “currencies” like impressions, ratings, clicks, likes, engagement, followers, view thru rate, and more. These are nice to have, but the only “currency” that matters are sales dollars. But the effort we go through to see if media drives sales is way too complex and it takes too much time and money. So, let’s change the game and innovate on measurement to prove sales effectiveness in an easier, faster, more reliable way. If we can do that, we should see a much greater willingness to invest in media.

The call to action: Innovate to prove sales effectiveness for media investments.

Step 3: EFFICIENCY. Raise the bar on media efficiency to make media investments profitable.

This is not just about negotiating the lowest CPMs. This is about growing sales among the people reached at a cost that generates a profitable return. Note the word “profitable”. If media is profitable, brands will be more likely to invest to grow and less tempted to cut spending when facing profit challenges.

There are many ways to achieve efficiency beyond negotiating for the lowest CPMs. Programmatic media is a powerful way to increase reach, avoid excess frequency, and reach audiences in a brand-safe way across the digital landscape. But a recent ANA study illuminated several areas of opportunity. There are smart actions you can take, such as eliminating websites with no audiences or avoiding MFA’s, also known as Made for Advertising sites, an incredible waste of money. But the most urgent action needed is to address the media supply chain, which currently includes too many touches where money gets taken along the way.

Does it make any sense that for every dollar we invest in programmatic media, only about 36 cents gets to the consumer? For example, we all know about tech fees, but I recently learned about something called “variances,” which reconciles discrepancies on fees between Demand Side Platforms and Selling Side Platforms that brands pay for! Although we are unhappy about these variances, at least we learned about them because our programmatic partners openly shared the touches and costs along the supply chain so they could be addressed. This is not the case with other players—we still have zero transparency of the supply chain with several platforms. It’s time to change—and it’s in everyone’s best interest. Programmatic has many benefits, but there are too many touches in the supply chain—and we all need to work together to make them transparent, address them, and eliminate costs to efficiently invest in driving market growth.

Another opportunity is avoiding excess frequency. Frequency is not bad—it just needs to be at the right level. But we need measurement to make frequency visible. We’re still flying with a sheet over the windshield among media providers with no idea how many times a consumer sees the same ad on the same day across platforms, websites and TV. The ANA has developed a Cross Media Measurement solution and other platforms have agreed to help pay for and use the system. P&G and several other companies have done the same and we invite others in the industry to participate too. And maybe when we all participate and become more efficient, the TV broadcasters will join too.

The call to action: Step up to eliminate wasteful touches and costs in the programmatic supply chain and avoid excess frequency through cross-media measurement.

Step 4: INTEGRATE. Raise the bar on integrating Reach, Effectiveness and Efficiency to grow markets. It’s a simple equation. Reach more consumers to attract them into the market, serve those consumers more effective advertising that leads to higher sales—at an efficient cost that delivers a profitable return. Reach, effectiveness, and efficiency mutually reinforce each other and create a flywheel of growth and value creation. The better the integration, the more you can invest and the more you can profitably grow your brand and the entire market.

One way we’ve discovered how to better integrate is through in-house media.

We have the data, the capability to do analytics and planning, the algorithms to optimize effectiveness and efficiency, and we’re increasing capability in buying and placement. At the same time, our agency partners are stepping up in innovative ways to create more value across the entire supply chain. In every brand/country where we’ve in-housed media, it’s saving us at least 10% a year, increasing speed to market, and leading to higher levels of effectiveness because we have the hands-on accountability of P&G people making better, faster and more integrated decisions about their brand’s media. As proof, each one of the brands in this article is leveraging in-house media to raise the bar on media that drives market growth.

The most important part of marketing is MARKET. MARKET MATTERS. Growing markets is the best kind of growth because it creates business, versus taking business from others. And media makes markets bigger through raising the bar on Reach, Effectiveness, and Efficiency—all integrated to mutually reinforcing each other.

There is significant upside potential by taking action to expand to reach ALL potential consumers and EACH unique consumer segment—measurement innovation to prove sales effectiveness, eliminate wasteful touches and costs in the programmatic media supply chain, invest in cross-media measurement for efficiency and build in-house capability to better integrate reach, effectiveness, and efficiency to deliver return on investment and profitability to grow markets.

There’s tremendous upside ahead. Stay focused on what matters…market growth. And leverage media…to make markets bigger.