• Adweek, Monday, April 9, 2007 12 PM

Procter & Gamble global CMO Jim Stengel says the consolidation of marketing for its Oral-B product line with units of French holding company Publicis Groupe will be a relationship of equal partners that will work "without boundaries." He says the arrangement is a pilot that it hopes will be applied to other P&G brands in the future.

The difference between this arrangement and an earlier experiment with Weiden + Kennedy on the Old Spice brand is that P&G only gave advertising and communication planning responsibilities to W + K. "That was putting two disciplines together," Stengel says. "This puts five or six together."
P&G picked Oral-B for the test because it's a big, global brand that's in developing and developed markets and has a management team that's ready to do something different. Stengel says that agencies as a whole can do a better job of collaborating and integrating their ideas and feels "the way we set this up will enable that to happen in a way that will be more effective, simple and faster."

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