P&G conference takeaways—Meta talks Threads, Publicis gets some love and Netflix on DSPs

Procter & Gamble Co.’s annual Signal conference this week brought its usual lineup of digital luminaries to the company’s Cincinnati headquarters, including executives from Amazon, Meta, Snapchat, Netflix and Publicis Groupe.

Notably absent this year were Google, Twitter and TikTok, the latter having been in attendance last year. And its executives might have wished they were there, because they were talked about plenty by competitors either directly or obliquely.

Here are some key takeaways from the annual innovation summit. 

Sadoun and Publicis get love

Among the more surprising things from Signal was Publicis Groupe CEO Arthur Sadoun getting plenty of love for his work, even if P&G has been reducing its use of big holding company agencies more broadly.

P&G has been aggressive in adding small agencies for project work and agency of record assignments (e.g. Curiosity on Zevo and Native), and bringing media planning and buying in-house.

Sadoun nevertheless got substantial face time with P&G executives, both in a presentation and at lunch, as the only major agency chief invited to present at a conference where, in many years, no agency leaders have appeared. Sadoun made a point about Publicis Groupe’s “Power of One” journey of eliminating “silos and bozos” gumming up the works by hoarding profit-and-loss authority. It’s a movement he credited in part to an instruction from P&G Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard that, “You need to make your complexity invisible to us.”

For his part, Pritchard gave Sadoun and Publicis a ringing endorsement in closing remarks.

“The agency world is a tough world, and it’s frankly in many ways declining,” Pritchard said, yet Publicis “is going the opposite direction. And because he had the foresight, he and his predecessor, to buy Sapient and Epsilon. They knew that they had to combine creativity with data with media.”

Pritchard added that “we’re looking at totally different agency models now. …Because the agency world isn’t going away. It’s just going to morph.”

Despite taking out ads at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to poke fun at the people who took jabs at Publicis in 2017 for hyping its Marcel AI platform, Sadoun admitted he’s pretty tired of AI talk.

“I’m pissed off at what’s happening at the moment,” Sadoun said. “It’s like AI was invented with ChatGPT. It’s ridiculous. …AI has been at the core of everything we do for years now.”

Also read: Advertisers may be to blame for AI's increased risks

Netflix in no hurry to add DSPs, even if it loses P&G business

Media presenters got plenty of opportunities to sell P&G on their inventory. Jeremi Gorman, president of worldwide advertising for Netflix, was having none of that, at least not at the price of letting a demand-side platform, specifically P&G’s preferred one, The Trade Desk, into the game.

“We are fortunate enough to be big enough—or we will be big enough on the ad-supported tier with our streaming hours—that we’re not selling into DSPs at the moment,” Gorman said. “We will run on the Xandr stack, which is great, but they are our sole provider.

“There are a number of companies, like Procter, where rightfully you say this is the one I want to use. And if you don't use this one, then we won't do business with you. You're not the only company that says that, and it's super fair, and you should absolutely have your preferred sources.”

Related: Netflix's Peter Naylor on new ad targeting capabilities

But Gorman said saying yes to one DSP means saying yes to all, and Netflix has no interest in that right now. She suggested advertisers and Netflix could “help each other” by determining which three DSPs are the best, which in turn she said would reduce such inevitable problems as unintentional violations of frequency caps.

She suggested the industry needs to come together “saying this is a problem. People ran away from TV because of this problem. And we can fix it with a more finite set of choices.”

Snapchat vs. TikTok

While TikTok wasn’t in attendance this year, it remained part of the conversation. Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel drew laughs from the crowd when asked what one word came to mind regarding TikTok. “China,” he answered.

Spiegel had a few more words about TikTok relative to Snapchat’s place in media plans. Pritchard, he noted, had been clear in P&G’s goal that Snap help the company’s brands reach 90% of their target audience with no waste and great creative. Snapchat fits nicely, he said, in part because more than 50% of its users on any given day don’t also use TikTok.

Meta vs. TikTok

Perhaps more surprisingly, given its relative size, Meta would also like a word with P&G about alternatives to TikTok.

Nicola Mendelsohn, head of the global business group for Meta, came to talk about, but not to sell, advertising on newly launched Threads. Mendelsohn did note that some P&G brands (e.g. Olay) are already on the platform, and encouraged more to experiment with the text-based app that is poised to rival Twitter. “There is no monetization opportunity there now,” she added, “nor will there be for some time.”

On the other hand, she eagerly encouraged more P&G brands to take advantage of all opportunities on Meta’s TikTok-fighter Reels. “I want to encourage you to kind of get where the people are,” Mendelsohn said. “Only about 50 of your brands today are actually testing and using Reels.”

P&G’s website lists only about 60 brands globally, not counting multi-brand efforts—but apparently, there’s always room for more.