P&G's Marc Pritchard Doubles Down on Demands of Digital Ad Giants
March 02 2017 - 1:50PM
Dow Jones News
By Alexandra Bruell
Procter & Gamble, the biggest advertising spender in the
world, is ramping up the pressure on the internet's most dominant
marketing platforms to urgently implement safeguards and
independent verification to assure advertisers that their money is
well spent.
Digital ad giants Google and Facebook recently said they are
prepared to let the Media Rating Council audit some of their data
and ad metrics, following criticisms that such platforms have been
grading their own homework, particularly after a series of
measurement mistakes at Facebook. But, "it's not enough," said Marc
Pritchard, chief brand officer and marketing lead for P&G, at
the Association for National Advertisers media conference in
Orlando, Florida.
"It's worth mentioning that we are encouraged by the recent
progress announced by the big players, Facebook and Google, and
what we've heard from several others," he said at the conference on
Thursday, according to prepared remarks provided by the company.
"But let's also be clear that the announcements indicate intention
and work in progress. It's not enough until the verification and
audits are actually implemented."
"We've been more than patient because we made these requests
nearly a year ago. So we need urgent completion, because then we
can get to the more important work of understanding the value we're
getting," Mr. Pritchard said.
Mr. Pritchard drew significant attention in the industry after
he complained in January at the Interactive Advertising Bureau's
Annual Leadership Meeting about the complexities in the digital ad
business, confusing agency contracts and the need for more
widespread adoption of an MRC ad viewability standard.
On Thursday, he said he's standing by those comments and his
tough stance on problems that he described as "more acute" in
digital advertising, where advertisers are now spending $72
billion, "surpassing TV."
"Sometimes we deliver a high quality media experience, but all
too often the experience is, well, crappy. We bombard consumers
with thousands of ads a day, subject them to endless ad load times,
interrupt them with pop-ups and overpopulate their screens and
feeds. And with ad blockers growing 40% and fraud as high as 20%,
who knows if they're even seeing our ads," he said.
Mr. Pritchard encouraged the industry's marketers, agencies,
publishers, ad tech platforms and suppliers to take action and
reiterated the steps that P&G already said it planned on
taking, including adopting one global viewability standard from the
MRC.
"We know it's the minimum standard," he said. "We know it's
probably not perfect, but we're adopting this standard in order to
move forward to conduct business on a level playing field across
platforms and publishers."
He also said that companies have been slow to respond to issues
plaguing the "media supply chain," in part because they have fallen
victim to industrywide "head fakes," such as "The MRC standard is
the lowest common denominator." "Yep, it is, and that's exactly
what we need and want," he said.
Other excuses that he referred to as "head fakes" included, "We
don't have sourced traffic because of privacy controls" and "We get
cheaper rates from low-cost publishers."
"At P&G, we are choosing to vote with our dollars," he said.
"We've already achieved media supply chain efficiencies, and
believe there is a long runway ahead. We don't want to waste time
and money on a crappy media supply chain."
Write to Alexandra Bruell at alexandra.bruell@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 02, 2017 13:35 ET (18:35 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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