The economy might not be as bad as it seems. Procter & Gamble Co. is using artificial intelligence to vet ads on the cheap and programmatic as its biggest media buying vehicle. Walmart’s Live Better U has a bigger college enrollment than any U.S. college campus. And Tik Tok isn’t really a social platform.

Those are among the things attendees learned at P&G’s annual Signal digital conference completed yesterday, which drew more than 2,000 virtual visitors in addition to a return to live presentations at the company’s Cincinnati headquarters and a nearby satellite site. Here are some of the key takeaways.

The economy may not be as bad as you think

Certainly, the economy was on people’s minds, as the latest Consumer Price Index report yesterday again put inflation at a four-decade high and the threat of recession looms. But P&G Chairman-CEO Jon Moeller said Wednesday the company’s strategy of focusing on daily categories where product superiority can win “sets us up very well for some of the economic conditions we’re facing.”

P&G’s focus will be on “performance-based value claims” and “consumer and customer delight at a very efficient cost,” Moeller said. “All that is enabled by increased digital acumen. ... When we get away from that, we become very efficient with chasing bright, shiny objects and forget our mission.”

Privately, P&G attendees at a speaker’s dinner the night before said they’ve seen little sign yet that consumers are changing behavior by trading down or buying—though that could change depending on how long the effects of the war in Ukraine last, said one attendee.

Speaking later, CivicScience CEO John Dick said that while his firm’s Economic Sentiment Index is near multi-year lows, two-thirds of consumers still see their economic condition as better or equal to where it was before the pandemic. He showed a number of categories where people say they’re cutting back due to inflation, but said surveys are often bad at measuring what people actually do, though better at the “who and the why.”

How digital is reshaping P&G marketing

This was the 11th year of P&G’s Signal conference, all on the watch of P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard and John Battelle, now CEO of Recount Media and longtime moderator of the event. And in his Q&A, Pritchard offered insights into how much impact digital now has on the biggest global advertiser (and No. 3 in the U.S.) per Ad Age Datacenter.

“Programmatic media is now our No. 1 spend pool and growing at a rapid rate,” Pritchard said. A spokeswoman later clarified that he was referring to the digital “spend pool,” not overall media spending.

Artificial intelligence has reshaped how P&G evaluates advertising, he said. The company’s “AI Studio” tool has transformed a copy-testing process that used to take 30 days and $30,000 to test per ad into a one-day, $1,000 process, Pritchard said. “It can be applied to literally any kind of communication, and it’s spreading around the world.”

Pampers marketing now starts with a “Due Date Calendar” that reaches people in the early stages of online search during pregnancy and leads them into a Pampers Rewards app. The largely digital and relationship marketing plan now reaches 95% of target parent households compared to the prior 60% reach of TV-centric plans, and at a savings of $25 million annually in the U.S., according to Pritchard.

Walmart is getting better as an ad and education platform

While it hasn’t quit its day job as a retailer, Walmart is making great strides as an ad platform and higher education backer, said CEO Doug McMillon. “We weren’t really good at first in terms of interaction with Walmart Connect when people were buying ads,” he said. “But we’re getting better, and the business is growing quickly.” He added: “Marc and P&G have taken advantage of that opportunity as well as anybody.”

McMillon also said that while he’d like the number to be higher, 77,000 Walmart employees have now enrolled in the company’s full-tuition-and-books-paid Live Better U college education program—a number bigger than any single U.S. state university campus. So far, 11,000 have earned degrees.

“You could argue maybe the government or the education system should fill that role,” McMillon said. “But there’s a gap. There’s a void. There’s a need. And we’re proud to fill it.”

TikTok is not a social platform

TikTok may get classified as social media, but it’s not, said Blake Chandlee, president of global business solutions. “We’re not a social platform,” he said. “We’re an entertainment platform that’s driven by the community. And so the kind of content that you experience for your feed is going to be different.” Chandlee said he still uses other social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, but added: “TikTok plays a different role in my life. It's replacing television.”

TikTok gets tougher scrutiny than Meta

Battelle asked Chandlee about recent controversies over sharing data with the Chinese government, to which he repeated TikTok’s statements that it doesn’t and won’t share data with China and that its database isn’t housed there. Off stage, in the conference’s virtual chat side rail, the social impact of TikTok’s addictive content-serving algorithm got considerable scrutiny from P&G and non-P&G attendees. Chandlee went over the extensive third-party oversight the company has allowed for its data handling and algorithms. “We opened up our algorithms for everybody to look at,” he said.

TikTok has “kind of crowded out the other elephant” in the room, Battelle said later in questioning Nicola Mendelsohn, VP of Meta’s Global Business Group. “It must be kind of nice not to be the focus of what can be pretty relentless press.”

Meta: 'It Isn’t over'

Asked by Battelle if—in light of the recent collapse of cryptocurrency values—whether “crypto is over, Web3 is over, blockchain is over,” Mendelsohn said, “I don’t think it’s over. I think there can be confusion sometimes between the metaverse and Web3.” She pointed to metaverse applications, such as virtual car design and various ways “a person can have a much deeper immersion spanning many minutes, perhaps even longer, with a brand in different ways.”

Epic OK with Meta in the ‘verse

Some of that metaverse car design and 3-D brand experience comes thanks to Epic Games making its Unreal Engine software available for free, noted Matthew Henick, metaverse lead for the company.

Epic Games is a metaverse native that seemingly would be threatened by Facebook going all in on the space. But in questioning from Battelle, the Facebook alum said he welcomed his old employer’s role. “They are basically saying that this is different than how their business was built before,” Henick said, “in terms of being able to move your data, of being able to move your accounts, being more equitable towards creators. And at Epic, we’re willing to partner with anybody who is saying that and backing it up with their actions.”

Mendelsohn reiterated the sentiment. “I think Web2 did get consolidated, with some of the big tech players and platforms,” she said. “I don’t think it’s going to be like that with the metaverse.”

The metaverse is hard to define

The metaverse came up in many discussions, and even got a Metaverse 101 display presentation and display from Cincinnati-based agency Court Avenue at Cintrifuse, the P&G-backed startup development facilitator that hosted a satellite session of Signal. But definitions varied.

Epic’s Henick might have provided the best one, though. “The most simple way that helps me to sleep at night is to think of the metaverse as a new way to access the internet,” said Henick, “around experiences that are synchronous. People are there. [Experiences] are 3-D and immersive. You can move around in them. It doesn’t mean you’re only accessing them through a headset. You could access them on a phone, on a Switch, on a PC, on a smart TV.”

Sustainability is big

Sustainability was big, mentioned as a high priority by executives from P&G, Walmart and other companies. One of the more popular presenters was Mike Zelkind, CEO of 80 Acres Farms, a vertical hydroponics operation built to reduce use of chemicals and eliminate waste by locating close to retail distribution hubs. It has a Cincinnati area farm near Kroger Co. headquarters, for one, a recently announced expansion into a new Atlanta farm and an R&D center close to Walmart headquarters in Arkansas.

Group Black is popular

Two of three co-founders of Group Black—a confederation of Black-owned media companies and creators that P&G announced a partnership with earlier this year—got a standing ovation from the in-person Signal crowd for their presentation, in which they talked about plans to raise $500 million in marketer investments for their member businesses this year.

“Our goal is a half billion dollars over 12 months into these businesses,” said Richelieu Dennis, co-founder and chairman of Group Black. “There’s a real business proposition for brands to be able to reach these very hard-to-reach, high-value audiences, but very hard to reach at scale.” With Group Black, content from a Black creator might be created for Essence, distributed via Afro Punk, the Shade Room and played at the Essence Festival, he said. “We’re now starting to see how an ecosystem can create real value."

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CLARIFICATION: This story has been updated to clarify that Pritchard was referring to P&G's digital "spend pool," not its overall media spending, when discussing programmatic media.