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