How Procter & Gamble Plans to ‘Widen the Screen’ for Black Creators and Media Companies

Advertising and media executives are facing a “perpetual state of disruption,” said Procter & Gamble's Marc Pritchard in his ANA 2021 keynote today, and he wants leaders to focus on three essential challenges: transparency, privacy and racial equity. Those first two points are familiar territory to conference attendees who have listened to Pritchard in the past. But in his speech to the ANA audience in New York on Thursday morning, Pritchard continued his more recent efforts to encourage advertisers to confront inequality. The consumer packaged goods (CPG) giant is unveiling an initiative designed to promote media projects from a Black perspective. Called “Widen the Screen,” the effort aims to build an “entire ecosystem” of black creators—including writers, producers, directors and media companies. Marrying this new creative expansion to his personal project of expanding advertising transparency, Pritchard vows to reorient spending across Black-owned media and agencies. The CPG leader will make its roster of minority-owned media companies “visible to all” starting with a list on the ANA website. The plan follows recent moves by major brands like General Motors, which refined its commitment to shift its spending to Black-owned media and agencies last month. For Pritchard, the themes he discussed at the ANA conference are an evolution of his approach to brand building within the concept of "constructive disruption." That idea is premised on the practical use of data and tech as opposed to exploring "innovation only." While primarily serving as a general framework to focus efforts on using tools like Big Data and economic modeling, the philosophy is also being applied to tackling thorny issues from P&G's marketing vis-a-vis sustainability to solving inequity in media. Resetting expectations on CPMs In his keynote, Pritchard noted that “data is lacking,” but ANA’s Alliance for Inclusive and Multicultural Marketing working group estimates that only 5% of U.S. spending is invested in multicultural marketing. “Considering that we are trying to reach 40% of the U.S. population, we are clearly underinvesting, and it’s time to step up,” Pritchard said, adding that he spoke with “several CEOs of Black- and Hispanic-owned-and-operated media companies to understand why." "They said, ‘You work with big agencies who work with big broadcasters to make big deals,'" Pritchard continued. "'You’re told that you reach ‘multicultural audiences’ with ‘general market’ media, and the CPMs are lower. It’s all about broad reach and low CPMs, regardless of whether the media is relevant or effective with our audiences.'” The answer involves brands resetting expectations on spending and what Pritchard called “the four R’s: reach, representation, relevance and resonance.” In that sense, the focus cannot just be on CPMs and pricing. The solution to bring multicultural agencies into balance depends on clear tracking and reporting “so every brand knows where they stand” in terms of ensuring accountability, he explained. “If you're focused on CPMs, you're missing the relevance and resonance parts,” Pritchard told Adweek before his keynote. “In some cases, you know what the resistance is if the CPMs are higher. In other cases we've had, we were told our expectations for CPMs [on multicultural media] are too low. The bottom line is, what we're trying to do is to broaden the definition of how to value media, and have it be about ‘reach, relevance resonance, representation.” Pritchard said P&G is talking with Nielsen about finding new media measurement methods designed to achieve those goals on diversity. Procter & Gamble is working with Black-owned production company Saturday Morning on 8:46 Films to create scripted programming. Among the other items Pritchard highlighted at the ANA conference, the brand is “directly connecting” with Black-Hispanic-Asian-Pacific Islander-Native-Indigenous-owned and operated media providers to give them full access to P&G and its brands. “We identified top media companies—with P&G Purchases, Carat, the ANA, and the National Association of Black Owned Broadcasters—to ramp up investments and to facilitate planning sessions for the upcoming broadcast year, just as we do with big media companies,” Pritchard said. The company is also building “joint-value” by creating partnerships with “dozens” of Black-owned media entities over and beyond annual transaction agreement. “When we do this, it leads to sponsorships like we have with Central City’s Stellar TV awards, Ebony’s Power 100, BET’s NAACP Image Awards, BET Awards, and many more,” he said. Additionally, P&G is developing capabilities for programmatic media buying intended to create greater access for investment. “This requires technical infrastructure, measurement tags, and inventory adjustments,” Pritchard said. “We’ve worked with Reset Digital as a leader, to help create a connection to The Trade Desk so money can flow programmatically to Black-owned and operated media inventory.” As a bellwether brand, P&G’s ability to shift the conversation by channeling its money strategically to underfunded media is impossible to overestimate. In order to “build an equitable and inclusive media supply chain for systemic investment equity,” P&G is making concentrating on evolving its support for the creative side as well as the media-buying element of its advertising plans. Procter & Gamble is teaming up with Spring Hill Entertainment to create These Hands, which limns a young man's imagination to “widen the range of career opportunities beyond athletics.” Sparking a creative reset The formal kick-off of “Widen the Screen” actually begins with a continuation of P&G’s partnership with Queen Latifah on the third season of her documentary series, Queen Collective, which features work by Black women directors. P&G is also working with Black-owned production company Saturday Morning on "8:46 Films" to create scripted programming. (The film project takes its name from the 8-minute-and-46-second duration of George Floyd’s murder and has since become a rallying cry against police brutality against Black people.) Lastly, P&G is teaming up with Spring Hill Entertainment to create "These Hands," a film which portrays a young man's imagination to “widen the range of career opportunities beyond athletics.” “We know how the images in advertising and media matter,” Pritchard said earlier this week. “Media can drive bias. And that bias can be positive or negative. And there's typically a very narrow view of the black community in media; it's either struggle or trauma or extreme excellence. There's so much more beyond that in terms of what should be portrayed. ‘Widen the Screen’ is about widening our view and widening opportunities that are way overdue.” Instacart Offers $1M in Advertising Credits to Black-Owned Brands