You will be thrilled to learn that according to Proctor & Gamble Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard, the CPG giant is about to tackle a major transformation, which will include media fragmentation, a shift to digital commerce and the power of artificial intelligence to “exponentially turbocharge” marketing, etc, etc, etc.. Whatever the hell that word salad du jour means. Unfortunately, anyone who’s ever worked on a P&G account knows that there’s rarely much turbocharging going on and it certainly isn’t exponential.
Readers of “Confessions of a Mad Man” will know that back in the sixties whilst I was at Benton & Bowles, New York, I inherited P&G’s Charmin, “bathroom tissue” account. (Referring to them as “toilet rolls” would have got you fired on the spot.) The star of the campaign was Mr. Whipple, advertising’s longest running TV spokesperson (almost thirty years.) Part of this enviable task required numerous trips to the “Marble Mausoleum,” P&G’s corporate headquarters in Cincinnati.
It also required attending numerous focus groups and other mind bending research sessions where every particular aspect of the creative was flogged to death by armies of pseudo psychologists and second-rate number crunchers. Which was not really necessary when you consider that Mr Whipple spent the entire thirty years of the campaign repeatedly imploring the hordes of little old ladies who inhabited his supermarket to “Please, do not squeeze the Charmin!” Whilst it was revealed that he himself was a closet squeezer of the product. Interestingly, Dick Wilson, who played Mr. Whipple more than 500 times, was a member of the Royal Canadian Air Force during World Two, and was a highly decorated Spitfire pilot during the Battle of Britain. Please squeeze that!
…
