Commentary

Do I Want To Be Marc Pritchard? Nah.

When I grow up, I want to be Marc Pritchard. He stands up at the annual Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in January and says that digital advertising’s a scam and that online advertising had also created an “exponential increase in crap.” If it was anyone else, an angry mob would have rushed the stage, hog-tied Pritchard and tossed him into the nearest volcano -- and THEN played golf.

But since Pritchard is the chief brand officer at Procter & Gamble, the world’s largest advertiser, who most sellers would sacrifice their first-born to get an audience with, not even rotten fruit flew from the crowd. In fact, there was probably a bunch of other Big Shot CMOs in the audience thinking "Shit, I shoulda said that!!" or simply nodding in agreement.

Though I might have lost count, Pritchard's utterings have been repeated (in various forms, many not accurate) thousands of times since then in thought leadership and white papers, podcasts, dog and pony shows, you name it, as a justification for one thing or another.

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His statements have probably been recast most often as an argument about how everyone else in the ad industry is wrong -- except the one who's doing the recasting, who has developed the only truly effective martech since the launch of Google AdWords.

I haven't seen something so widely quoted since Wenda Millard thumbed her nose at ad exchanges, saying we should "not trade our assets like pork bellies." For the next year, "pork bellies" turned up repeatedly in support of this position or that one, most of them having nothing to do with the context in which Wenda orated those words.

It has been fun to see just how creative folks could be in using Pritchard’s words to make a self-serving point.  Any day now I expect the farcical and deluded Sean Spicer to say something like "Even Marc Pritchard hates illegal aliens, as you could tell from his remarks at the IAB."

And certainly all of the newly coined “digital media truthers,” who think nearly everything about online advertising sucks, will rally around Pritchard's remarks — as will those who tend to see nothing but evil in just about everything having to do with marketing, advertising or promotion.

Almost certainly, this will become the rallying cry of sellers of broadcast, OOH and print media (that is, until the client says, "online is really working for us," and suddenly the pitch will shift to the digital products progress has forced on traditional media).

Like a giant game of telephone tag, the more often Pritchard is quoted, the more out of context his words will be used. "Like Marc Pritchard says, the outlook for tomorrow is gloomy with clouds and rain until after 3 p.m…."

Frankly, it is time for Pritchard to retire. His 15 minutes of frame have peaked; there is probably little else he can ever do or say that will gain him as much notoriety — except bad news like a soft quarter at P&G, when the CEO speculates that it might be time for a "change in direction" for marketing.

On the other hand, maybe I don't want to grow up to be Marc Pritchard (free Charmin, Tide and Crest notwithstanding). Basic physics of PR: Too long under the spotlight, you start to blister.

6 comments about "Do I Want To Be Marc Pritchard? Nah.".
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  1. dorothy higgins from Mediabrands WW, March 3, 2017 at 12:11 p.m.

    Goodness. I hope you feel better now.  I have been quoting (or perhaps misquoting) Pritchard for years in the Media Foundations course I teach to new-entry Mediabrands talent.  We are stewards of our clients' media investments and Pritchard's calls for due diligence, accuracy and accountability are a clarion call to us to do our jobs right. He is 100% correct that we have allowed fuzzy processes and slippery validation to muddy digital waters. This mud besmirches all of our integrated measurements. We have NEVER allowed TV planning and buying to be so murky. It is time for redress.  If I disagreed with your screed any more there would two of me. 

  2. George Simpson from George H. Simpson Communications, March 3, 2017 at 12:16 p.m.

    Ms Higgins: I can no position on his comments, only that they are often used to make other arguments. I am sure one of you is enough.

  3. George Simpson from George H. Simpson Communications, March 3, 2017 at 12:16 p.m.

    I take no position (sorry for my haste)

  4. dorothy higgins from Mediabrands WW, March 3, 2017 at 12:24 p.m.

    George, my ex-husband certainly thinks one of me is more than enough. :)

  5. Ed Papazian from Media Dynamics Inc, March 3, 2017 at 1:41 p.m.

    A agree, Dorothy. While I found Pritchard's acceptance of the IAB's definition of a "viewable" digital ad to be questionable, the rest of what he said made a lot of sense and it's not just a matter of the old media using this as a form of push back. Rather it's a clear warning to the digital ad selleing "establishment" that TV-oriented branding advertisers---not just P&G, by the way----have, at long last, looked at digital under a microscope and they are not happy with what they see. If it were true that the vast majority of TV viewing is switching almost overnight to digital venues, as we are constantly told by dreamy data enthusiasts who never seem to look at data, then Pritchard's comments might be shrugged off by digital ad sellers as P&G and many other avertisers would have no choice but to switch massively into digital. As this is not the case, digital media's giants and their lesser colleagues had better pull their heads out of the sand and start learning how advertising and media planning/buying really works and make the needed corrections----before it's too late. While they are at it, they might also try to make the online user's experience a more pleasant and rewarding one.

  6. dorothy higgins from Mediabrands WW, March 3, 2017 at 2:04 p.m.

    Thanks, Ed. An enormous challenge for all of us is the issue of uniques, both overall and geographically. No matter what fancy dancing we do we must ensure we touch/reach daily as many people in our current and prospective audiences as we can. If we don't know exactly who we are messaging across multiple digital platforms and partners and do not know where geographically those messages are distributing we lose confidence in two key strategic KPIs: our target reach goals overall and our geographic message distribution goals. 

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