• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, June 21, 2012

Procter & Gamble Marketing Chief Marc Pritchard kicked off the company’s Cannes presentation by pointing out that you can teach old marketing dogs new tricks. Specifically, he noted that P&G will celebrate its 175^th anniversary this year.

“You might want to say we’re old. We’re older than many countries,” he noted, adding that it hasn’t stopped the company from trying to stay fresh and reinventing itself and the way it markets its products.

“We try to approach everyday with the freshness of an upstart,” he said, adding that consumers don’t really care how long they’ve been around. They only care how well its products perform, and how effectively its marketing is at influencing how they perceive that.

Pritchard noted that unlike many mass marketers, P&G doesn’t make “passion products.”

“We make soap and diapers and toothpaste and toilet paper. People don’t think much about the products we make,” he confessed. That is until the brief moments during their day when they actually use them, such as when they “wipe their…” (visualize Prichard gesturing with his hand to swipe his backside)…  their countertop.”

Okay, so he’s not exactly a standup comedian, but his timing is good, and his message is a solid one for the creative gathered to hear him here at Cannes, which is that the company has to make “noticeably better products” and that it needs its agencies to help “bring them to life with noticeably better creative ideas.”

“We can take the products that people hardly think about and persuade them to think about us in a new way,” he said of the opportunity that creates. And then he revealed P&G’s super-secret method for testing advertising creativity.

“My top secret proprietary testing method,” he said, “is how does it make me feel. Your heart may pound, your blood may race. For me, it’s really simple, it makes my spine tingle.”