My friend Dana buys media for a living. We were at the cart pod on Southwest Alder last week, eating too fast before her afternoon calls, when she put her phone face down and said, with real feeling, that she had spent the morning explaining to a client why the biggest advertiser on earth deleted a hundred million dollars from digital and nothing broke.
That is the number Marc Pritchard put on P&G's earnings call at the end of July. Over a hundred million dollars pulled out of digital in a single quarter, over brand safety and viewability and the general question of whether a human being was on the other end of the impression. Sales held. Organic growth held. The company then told everybody about it, which is the part I keep turning over.
Cutting the money is a procurement story. Announcing that the cut cost you nothing is a positioning move against your own suppliers.
If you can remove a hundred million dollars from a system and nobody downstream can feel it, you were never buying attention, you were buying inventory.
I have watched this from inside brand strategy rooms for years. The media plan arrives with impressions in the millions and a viewability rate somewhere in the fifties, and everyone nods, because the alternative is admitting that half the line item is a rounding error dressed as reach. Pritchard has been saying a version of this in public since his speech to the IAB in January, when he told a ballroom full of people that the supply chain they built was murky at best and fraudulent at worst. The difference now is that he has a quarter of evidence and no drop in sales to hide behind.
Three things follow for the rest of us, and none of them require P&G money.
One, a flat result after a cut is a finding, not a relief. It means the spend was buying incremental nothing, and you should go looking for the rest of the incremental nothing immediately.
Two, most digital budgets are quietly funding retargeting people who had already decided. That is not marketing. That is paying a toll to stand next to a customer walking toward your door.
Three, the brands that survive a spend cut are the ones with something to be remembered for. Tide has fifty years of distinctive assets doing work no impression can claim credit for. Your brand either has that reservoir or it does not, and a media plan is a terrible place to find out.
A flat result after a cut is a finding, not a relief.
I sang at the bar on Thursday, badly, and the host who calls everyone baby told me the room was with me. The room was mostly not there. I would rather know that than be told the impressions were served.