The Future of Advertising at Procter & Gamble

Adweek’s Interactive Quarterly has an
interesting interview with Denis Beausejour, vice president of advertising at
Procter & Gamble, one of the first big consumer
products companies to embrace interactive and Internet marketing.

Among other things, he says that P&G is beginning to look more to a direct
response model in its relationships with agencies, rather than clickthroughs
and hits.

Beausejour said he thinks that there will be “two kinds of agencies 10 years from now:
digital agencies and dinosaur agencies. In other words, I see all these
convergences that we’re talking about and not just in what the consumer sees
but in how the ads are made and how the consumer research is done behind the ads…being profoundly influenced by these technologies.”

Beausejour said that P&G will host a conference called the Future of
Advertising
Stakeholders Summit, (FAST) at its Cincinnati headquarters on August 20-21.
With representatives from advertisers, online publishers, agencies and
technology companies, the summit will allow all of the voices concerned with
the future of Web advertising to
state their views.

He added that topics will range from a specific discussion of online
advertising models to the ways in which changes in technology are redefining
advertising, advertising agencies, P&G and the very idea of what it means to
be a brand.

“I think the [ad] model we want to have is driven around a combination of fee
and [brand] sales incentives, so that the agencies can front up with us and
have exactly the same goals and not be trapped by the media compensation
system, which forces them to
focus [on budgets],” he said.

“We believe that having some component of sales volume [as a factor in
compensation] will make the motives identical. I’m saying, without having
the final plan ready, where I want to go is with compensation on sales.”

The full text of the interview is available here.