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.