Pete Carter was fully prepared to really retire when he left Procter & Gamble Co. in August. But he says people started approaching him to tap his expertise on agencies, which makes sense given that, by his estimate, he’s evaluated about 300 of them in recent years for P&G.

So the man who since 2018 has been a key player in the “Flow” part of P&G’s “Fixed and Flow” agency model – in which the consumer goods giant tries new shops on projects while keeping agencies of record on the bulk of brand work – has begun an agency consulting business. But it’s an atypical one. He steers marketers away from conducting traditional agency reviews and counsels agencies on how to fix their own branding.

None of this was in Carter’s plan Aug. 1 when he finished work at P&G after 40 years, most recently as group VP of brand building integrated communications. That’s a long title for a job heading the company’s 50-person in-house advertising and communications consultancy, reporting to Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard.

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Carter had a list of vacation destinations and a plan for watching his grandkids. But then he started getting consulting inquiries from industry contacts on both the client and agency sides. P&G isn’t among the clients, he says, and he declined to name others, citing confidentiality.

As an indication as to how ad hoc the process was, Carter didn’t have a name or an LLC set up for his consultancy until he formed Creative Haystack LLC on Monday. As the name implies, Carter sees his work primarily as helping clients find just the right creative needle in a large haystack of choices, not just in terms of agencies, but also in marketing propositions.

An initial client was looking for a digital agency, he says, but he began the conversation with a question: “Do you know what your brand stands for?” The answer was no, and his response was: “How are you going to create visuals if you don’t know what your brand stands for?”

Another client approached acknowledging that they only had money to hire an agency until the end of the fiscal year and needed an agency that knows something about the fitness brand CrossFit. (The client is not CrossFit.) “And I said, ‘OK, I’ve got just the agency, located in Boulder, Colorado. They do CrossFit. That's one of their clients. Within a week, they had an agency and were off to the races.”

Carter vastly prefers introducing clients to agencies based on their experience and cultural fit for trial projects rather than running reviews. It was the same approach he used in recent years matching numerous agencies with P&G brands. And he believes it’s the direction in which the industry should be heading rather than putting agencies through costly reviews.

Carter confesses a preference for many of the small agencies he’s encountered in recent years.

“They usually have escapees from the bigger agencies, and they usually are more focused on the work and not on the bean-counting,” Carter says. “That's a big difference. Yes, the big agencies are great. I love some of the agencies that I've dealt with at P&G. But the small agencies add a little bit of spice to the mix.”

Carter acknowledges that while P&G and most other marketers have embraced purpose in their marketing — and he sees a definite place for that — his primary focus is on finding agencies that can help marketers sell stuff.

Agencies have been reaching out to him in recent weeks for advice, too, on how to position themselves, Carter says. It’s an effort he sees as much needed because so many have trouble differentiating themselves from the pack. And for them, he has similar advice when it comes to purpose.

“I had one agency come to me and say, ‘We want to be the purpose agency,’” Carter says. “I said: 'Do you know how many agencies think that they’re the purpose agency? It’s not a defined and distinctive positioning, if that’s what you really think you are.'”

Whether his advice to agencies ultimately becomes a core part of Creative Haystack isn’t clear yet, but it’s something Carter admits he gives away free at times.

“I am going to try to work both sides,” he says, “because sometimes I think these agencies need to hear the client’s perspective.”

Even if they don’t ask, Carter usually offers advice after hearing an agency’s pitch. “Very few get away with just, ‘Hey, that was great. See ya.’ I usually tell them, ‘You didn’t really ask for this, but here's my advice on how you can improve your pitch.'"

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