P&G takes Secret deodorant work in house, saves lots

Industry Contributor 16 Jun 2019 - 2 min read

P&G takes Secret deodorant work in house, saves lots

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Tags: advertising, P&G, in-house, marketing, creative, media, Wieden & Kennedy, Secret Deoderant

Procter & Gamble is doing almost all advertising and media planning for its Secret deodorant brand in house - and says it’s saving a tonne of money as a result (AdAge).

Key points

Wieden & Kennedy agency of record until earlier this year, when P&G reviewed account and brought in WPP’s Berlin Cameron on a project basis
P&G has since decided to do almost everything in house with brand team
Now making ads “for as little as a tenth of the cost”, says P&G vice chairman and CFO Jon Moeller
P&G says controlling planning also enables better realtime responses

Creating ads for 10% of the cost is music to the CFOs ears. But cost is one thing, effectiveness another.

AdAge’s article embeds Wieden & Kennedy’s last ad for the brand alongside an in house effort. The former undoubtedly cost more, not least for the number of people in the ad and simultaneous moving parts, whereas P&G used employees and their families, filmed individually. The ads are tonally very different; W&K demanding pay equality via caustic humour; P&G taking a more measured approach to ‘strong, sophisticated ladies’.

How did they do? According to Youtube, the in house ad racked up 2.9m views on Secret’s channel over four months. Wieden & Kennedy’s ad had 5.5m in six months. So W&K wins on that metric, if not on cost.

A year’s worth of comparable data is required to gauge the short-term impact of in housing. But the long-term challenge for brands is keeping advertising fresh and resisting cultural myopia. Chobani’s CMO recently flagged that as a key risk, and while Chobani does 90% of its work in house, said the firm will “probably use [agencies] more in a year or two” to ensure it is not just drinking its own Kool Aid.