Procter & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard has a message for his agencies: "Frankly, your complexity should not be our problem, so we want you to make that complexity invisible," he said during an on-stage interview Wednesday at the Ad Age Digital Conference.
Mr. Pritchard was addressing the fact that because digital marketing has changed so rapidly, it has "created a whole long tail of agencies." But as the world's largest advertiser works to consolidate its agencies, Mr. Pritchard is seeking much "greater end-to-end integration," he said.
Many digital agencies are still "technical in nature," he said. But "our expectation is that over time, our agency partners, whoever we chose, are going to be able to integrate [all of the workload], so you can get the production out, the distribution out as well as the creative out."
He sheds more light on the issue in the video below, in which he also addresses ad-blocking:
On stage, Mr. Pritchard addressed a range of digital topics, including giving a positive review of P&G's use of programmatic buying.
"It's gone well for us," he said. "What it has produced is the ability to reach people on a mass scale with greater precision. It's improved our ROI, and what I think we are going to do is keep upgrading and continuing to grow over time." He added: "There is no question it will extend into the TV world at some point. … So it's just something that's going to happen."
