P&G's Marc Pritchard promises further belt-tightening in marketing and media

Procter & Gamble chief brand officer Marc Pritchard has said that the company will continue to pursue efficiencies across its advertising and marketing supply chain – with agency fees, production costs and media spend all areas where spending can be further reined in.

"Even after saving $1 billion in the past five years in agency fees and production costs, we still see a long runway in a number of areas," Pritchard told the Morgan Stanley Global Consumer & Retail Conference in New York on Tuesday.

"First of all, we still see there's more room in agency fees. There's still ways in which we can reduce the amount of effort we put and where, and how we co-locate people, because that takes time, touches and distance out, which takes costs out," he said, adding that P&G also believes further efficiencies could be made across production, because the "supply chain in the industry is an expensive one".

Pritchard pointed to the decision earlier this year to bring advertising for US deodorant brand Secret in-house, after splitting with Wieden & Kennedy – a move that he said led to huge cost savings.

The consumer-goods giant, which has been on a money-saving, efficiency blitz over the past five years, is well-known for taking the advertising industry to task over what is perceived to be inefficiencies. 

"One of the biggest ones we see is media. There's an enormous amount of waste in media," Pritchard added, lamenting the fact that many consumers will be bombarded by the same ad, sometimes more than a dozen times. "That's one of the biggest inefficiencies in media. We're really working on driving that out – and taking that excess frequency out and reinvesting it in more reach."

P&G, he said, was moving away from "wasteful mass marketing to precision one-to-one brand-building on a mass scale". 

Pritchard continued: "Many of our brands still are only reaching 60% of their target audiences and they pretty much use our brands every day. Everyone brushes their teeth, hair and does their laundry, so we can get up to 90% and that's what we're going to try to get to – keep digging the waste out and reinvesting to get more reach."