P&G’s Mark Pritchard on Harnessing AI and Retail Media for Effective Advertising – Beet.TV

Oct 28, 2024

ORLANDO, Fl — Can artificial intelligence help sell diapers and toothpaste?

In 2024, AI’s application in ad agencies seemed to move from theory to practice.

In this video interview with Beet.TV, household-goods brand umbrella group Procter & Gamble’s Chief Brand Officer Mark Pritchard said the company is seeing real productivity boosts from AI in ads.

P&G has been using AI and machine learning for many years in areas like programmatic media buying.

The company also has an in-house tool called AI Studios, which uses decades of advertising testing data to predict the effectiveness of new ads.

“It’s remarkable because it allows us now to test ads in hours for thousands versus what used to be weeks and 30,000 to test one ad,” Pritchard said. “We can iterate far more quickly as a result of using that.”

Search is a major component of retail media, and P&G is increasingly using programmatic capabilities to retarget people and drive them to purchase.

“One thing to know about – retail media search is a huge part of retail media, which makes a lot of sense,” Pritchard said.

“When people are aware of a product, they go search. If they can search on a retail platform, they know they’re going to be closer to the ability to purchase and then they can quickly purchase that.”

While P&G is already able to cap ad frequency within individual platforms, the next frontier is cross-media frequency capping. The company is working with the ANA and platform partners to develop this capability.

“That will be very exciting because what that allows us to do then is to be able to plan so you can still reach that 80% of people, but do it with less overlap and duplication on frequency,” Pritchard said.

“And that’s going to be good for growth because we’ll be able to reinvest that savings back into reaching more people.”