• by Karl Greenberg , June 15, 2007

Procter & Gamble is "bringing the love back" through what it calls influencer marketing--sort of a public relations on steroids.

P&G's Anthony Rose described it in depth at yesterday's ANA Masters of Integrated Marketing event. Rose, associate director, Global Beauty External Relations, and co-leader, Influencer Marketing Center of Excellence at P&G, was really echoing a message others had delivered during the day: telling consumers what they need to hear doesn't work.

To make his point, he played a B-to-B ad from Microsoft showing a guy in a T-shirt that read "advertiser" waiting at a restaurant. A pretty woman shows up late to meet him. Her T-shirt reads "Customer."

"I want a divorce," she says. "You don't listen to me, you don't understand me. I've changed." He plays the lout, explaining to her that he does understand her: "You're 24-35." His last line is "Bring the love back."

He said the proliferation of new products in P&G's market--26,893 new products launched every year, and 700 new brand intros every day--are giving a boost to integrated marketing that centers on PR.

"The fact that 90% of TV homes zapped commercials through DVR--for P&G these are scary statistics," he said. "On the other hand, 44% of Internet users have generated online content, and 30% of them have their own sites."

P&G is "bringing the love back" through influencer marketing, he said.

"We used to call it brand PR, but in the past few years it's grown." He said 18 months ago P&G did tests using influencers in the marketing mix on a number of global brands.

"We were able to isolate the impact of this work. The return on investment was higher than other media," he said, without quantifying.

P&G is using influencer marketing--using such legitimate third-party endorsers as celebrities, physicians and the like--to build awareness.

"Nothing can substitute for mass media in terms of awareness," Rose said, "but credible awareness comes from third-party endorsers."

As an example, two years ago, P&G's Olay brand got a huge awareness boost from consumers and doctors who discovered that Olay's skin-care products contained the same substance as a much higher-cost skin-care brand that was being positioned as an alternative to surgery to remove wrinkles. The story was picked up on national media.

"A lot of this was spontaneous combustion in the beginning," he said. "Dermatologists were able to connect with us and provide a point of view." Influencer marketing can also break barriers to trials. P&G's Head and Shoulders shampoo had been a brand bought principally by men, but the company wanted women to buy it as well. "The biggest challenge was that women didn't believe a dandruff shampoo could make their hair beautiful," he said, explaining that P&G approached Cosmopolitan, urging its editors to back H&S as a beautifying shampoo.

"They said, 'if you do testing--third-party testing--and prove to us that this works, we would be willing to consider endorsing the brand.'"

The tests were done, showing the new H&S formula could do what Cosmo had demanded, and P&G developed an integrated program around the idea that Cosmo has discovered "A new secret to gorgeous hair," he says.

P&G worked through different media, with celebrities, with in-store, back-of-package, and advertising using Cosmopolitan London's endorsement of H&S, with the tag, "Surprise Yourself."

P&G, he says, had the opposite problem with Pantene, which research showed was perceived as aloof and cold. No one believed it was possible to attain perfect "Pantene hair."

Rose said P&G developed an influencer campaign via The Entertainment industry foundation and celebrities, and the American Cancer Society to develop "Pantene Beautiful Lengths," a corporate goodwill program tying the Pantene name to a national program, via DeVries PR in New York, in which women were encouraged to cut eight inches of their hair off and donate it for wigs for women battling cancer.

Rose concedes that technology presents a challenge particularly for PR. "In the 'old' days if we had any crisis we had 24 hours to respond. Today we don't have that flexibility; everything is real time. While one part of the world is sleeping, people in another expect answers. I think the other piece is that technology today means everyone is an influencer."

Rose said the difference between PR and influencer marketing is scope.

"P&G has brought reach and spectrum of influence to it. In top brands we have mapped different and specific groups of influencers. For example we have, on one brand, denoted psychologists as key influencers, because the brand is experiential. What is new is discipline and broadening of scope of work and investment that we are able to put into it.

"So much has changed in terms of how PR professionals are operating today. The kind of work they are accountable for. The Head & Shoulders and Pantene programs started as PR, and then were shaped with broader agency themes; PR has become a source of commercial ideas."